Florence Nightingale and the 25 Year Fever

Dear Friends,

Sometimes life switches from easy mode to hard mode. For most people, this switch from easy to hard is unexpected and unwanted. They're forced to deal with hard mode against their will.

For Florence Nightingale, it was just the opposite. She was born into a wealthy family in Victorian England and rejected the role that her family and society expected her to play. She received an advanced education thanks to her father's liberal views (well, for the time) on women's education. Apart from excelling in standard subjects such as history, philosophy, and math, she also displayed an extraordinary ability to collect and analyze data.

However, her family (and 19th-century England as a whole) expected her to play the role of an upper class woman of her time. She was expected to be a socialite. Now, I'm a guy from the 21st century. I don't really know what it means to be a socialite in 19th century England. I think it means you have to have lots of parties, go to lots of parties, and somehow keep everyone entertained without any Netflix. During your downtime, maybe you reorganize the china cabinet. Or have your servants do it for you. What I do know is that Florence looked at this lifestyle and said, "no way Jose". Yeah, I'm pretty sure those were her exact words.

Nursing was only a budding field at the time, but Florence knew that's what she wanted to do. She spent 4 months at a community in Germany helping to care for the "sick and deprived". She visited hospitals in London, Dublin, Edinburgh and Paris. She learned everything she could. Finally, she won a personal victory against the socialite life she had been expected to lead. She landed a job as superintendent of the "Hospital for Invalid Gentlewomen". It has a certain ring to it.

And thus ends our story. Upper class educated woman leaves home and gets a job as a boss. 

Well, no. Here's where things get interesting. After the Crimean War started, the English Secretary of War asked Florence if she could take a staff of nurses to an army hospital near the war front. And she says, "Hell yeah!" (Again, I'm pretty sure those were her exact words.) Except, it wasn't exactly a hospital. It was more of a barracks and injured soldiers were just, you know, put there. The place was a total mess. Blood, feces, rats, lice, you name it. The first order of business was to just clean things up. England had to send a sanitation team to flush out the sewers. Over 4,000 men died in the first six months after she arrived. 

Florence was known for making the rounds at the hospital and speaking to the injured soldiers while she checked their injuries. She gave them the dignity of being heard in the worst of conditions. She restored the sense of humanity in an inhumane environment. Just as importantly, she kept extensive notes on her patients and found that more patients were dying from infection than from their injuries. As a gifted statistician, she used polar area diagrams (sort of like a pie chart on steroids) to help illustrate the data backing up her ideas. While she didn't quite invent the pie chart or the histogram, she was definitely using them before they were cool. 

And thus ends our story. Upper class educated woman leaves home, turns around a war hospital, figures out hygiene, and made pie charts cool. 

Well, no. During the war, Florence contracted Brucellosis, known at the time as Crimean Fever. She was bedridden intermittently for the following 25 years. (Think about that the next time you get sick for a measly few days.) She also battled her own depression which, at the time, was poorly understood and not treatable by today’s standards.

Florence fought Brucellosis for more than two decades. Yet, she continued to work on social reforms in healthcare and women's roles, she wrote the seminal book on nursing, and founded her namesake school of nursing. Today, the Nightingale Pledge is recited by new nurses when they graduate. She died at the age of 90. 

Florence Nightingale abandoned the life that was prescribed for her and made her own path, regardless of the difficulty. Throughout it all, she was a dedicated diarist and writer of letters to her friends, which often included her thoughts and feelings about the events around her. In the coming months, I'll be launching Hard Mode (the app!) which provides a structure and framework for you to write about your life and whatever's bothering you. You may not be inventing pie charts or nursing, but whatever it is you're up against, it's probably worth writing about.

Until next time, and keep going.

- Geoff