49 Fun Facts About Florence Nightingale

By what nickname did Florence Nightingale become famous during her wartime nursing?

The Lady with the Lamp comes from a newspaper report of her making her rounds alone at night, a little lamp in her hand, after the medical officers had gone to bed.

Nightingale nursed soldiers wounded in Britain's war against which country?

Russia was the enemy in the Crimean War; newspaper reports of wounded British soldiers left without proper care stirred such feeling at home that the government appealed for nurses, and she answered.

Why was Nightingale, an English gentleman's daughter, born in Florence?

A honeymoon tour that lasted years took her parents across Europe, and they named each daughter after the city where she was born; the family went home to England when Florence was a baby.

What was Nightingale's father's surname at birth, before he inherited an estate?

Shore was his name until he inherited the Lea estate in Derbyshire from a rich relative, Peter Nightingale, and took the surname with it, so nursing's most famous name came by way of a will.

Which subject, unusual for a girl of her time, did Nightingale study at home and later use in her reforms?

Mathematics fascinated her from childhood, and she later turned it on the army's death records, using the figures to press her case for reform on ministers and officials.

What did Nightingale, aged sixteen, record receiving in February 1837?

A call from God to serve others, she wrote, though it did not say how; it took years, and battles with her family, before she settled on nursing.

Why did Nightingale turn down the politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes after a long courtship?

Her vocation came first: he satisfied her mind and her heart, she wrote, but not the moral, active side of her nature, which needed work that life as his wife could not give.

Which politician, a friend of Nightingale since they met in Rome in 1847, sent her out to the war hospitals?

Sidney Herbert, the Secretary at War, asked her to lead the nurses, and after the war the two drove army reform so hard that his health broke down; he died in 1861.

What kind of pet did Nightingale rescue in Greece in 1850 and keep as an inseparable companion?

A little owl it was: the two were inseparable until the pet died, just before she left for the war, and she had it preserved; it can still be seen at her museum in London.

At which German religious community did Nightingale train as a nurse in 1851?

Kaiserswerth's Lutheran deaconesses trained her for a few months in the teeth of her family's disapproval, and her anonymous report on the place was her first published work.

Before the war, Nightingale ran a small hospital in London's Harley Street for which patients?

Sick gentlewomen were its patients; the post of superintendent was unpaid, so she lived on an allowance from her father, and she left after a year to lead the nurses to the war.

Nightingale's war hospital stood far from the Crimea, across the Black Sea in a suburb of which city?

Constantinople's suburb of Scutari held the barracks hospital, hundreds of miles from the fighting, so the wounded reached her only after a voyage across the Black Sea.

Which engineer was commissioned to design a prefabricated hospital after Nightingale's plea to The Times?

Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed it in wooden sections that were shipped out from England and put up on the Dardanelles, where the death rate was less than a tenth of that at her own hospital.

What killed far more soldiers in Nightingale's war hospital than their wounds did?

Disease such as typhus, cholera and dysentery swept the wards, and Nightingale came home determined to prove it; her evidence led to a Royal Commission on the army's health.

What did the Sanitary Commission do at Scutari in March 1855 that sharply cut deaths?

Flushed the sewers and improved ventilation: the hospital stood over a broken sewer, which Nightingale, blaming poor food, had not suspected, and the lesson made sanitation her life's cause.

Which Jamaican-born nurse ran the 'British Hotel' for soldiers in the Crimea during the war?

Mary Seacole's own memoir records a single meeting with Nightingale, and a friendly one: passing through on her way to the front, she asked for a bed for the night and was given it.

What did soldiers call Nightingale after she broke into a locked store for medicines?

The lady with the hammer is how the story goes: denied the supplies she needed for the wounded, she is said to have smashed the lock herself to get at them.

Which American poet's 1857 poem 'Santa Filomena' helped popularise Nightingale's nickname?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow pictured her passing through the wards at night, and his verse did as much as any news report to turn a working nurse into a national legend.

At which London hospital did Nightingale open her training school for nurses in 1860?

St Thomas' Hospital opened the school on 9 July 1860, and its graduates were sent out to hospitals across Britain and abroad to start training nurses the same way.

Who paid for the nursing school Nightingale opened in 1860?

The public, through a fund opened in her honour in November 1855 while she was still away at the war: donations poured in and soon passed £40,000.

What is the title of Nightingale's best-known book, which became the core text at her own training school?

Notes on Nursing was written for people looking after the sick at home, not for professionals, yet it sold well to the general public and became the core text for trainees.

In 1865 the first trained Nightingale nurses were sent to Liverpool to care for which patients?

Workhouse paupers had until then been nursed by other paupers; the team's leader, Agnes Jones, died of typhus caught on the wards within three years.

Which gin-drinking Dickens nurse was said to be only a mild exaggeration of nursing before Nightingale?

Sarah Gamp, the tipsy nurse of Martin Chuzzlewit, was so well known that 'gamp' became British slang for an umbrella, after the one she always carried.

Which American, mentored by Nightingale in the 1870s, is called 'America's first trained nurse'?

Linda Richards came to England in 1877 to train under Nightingale, then went home to set up nursing schools and later carried the system on to Japan.

In 1907 Nightingale became the first woman to receive which honour?

The Order of Merit reached her too late to enjoy: at 87 her sight and mind were failing, and when it was brought to her bedside she grasped only that a kindness was being done, murmuring 'Too kind, too kind'.

What type of chart did Nightingale use to show what was killing soldiers?

The polar area diagram, or 'rose diagram', made her case at a glance: she sent the charts to MPs and officials who, she judged, would never read a table of figures.

Of which learned body did Nightingale become the first female member?

The Royal Statistical Society elected her for her work on army and hospital death figures, the evidence that pushed the government into an inquiry and then into reforming the army's health.

During which war did the United States government ask Nightingale for advice on caring for its soldiers?

The American Civil War began five years after she came home from her own war, and her ideas inspired the volunteer Sanitary Commission that looked after the Union's troops.

What is the title of Nightingale's best-known feminist essay, named for a woman of Greek myth?

Cassandra, named for the prophetess nobody believed, poured out her rage at the idle, powerless life expected of women of her class, a life she herself escaped by leaving home to run a hospital.

Which 1918 book by Lytton Strachey gave Nightingale a chapter of her own?

Eminent Victorians swapped the saintly heroine of legend for a far fiercer figure: 'A Demon possessed her', Strachey wrote, and he showed her driving her allies as hard as she drove herself.

From 1857 Nightingale was often bedridden; which illness did a later biography blame?

Chronic brucellosis, a bacterial infection, would explain both the 'Crimean fever' that nearly killed her in May 1855 and the years of pain that followed; others have suggested chronic fatigue syndrome.

Which retail innovation did the bedridden Nightingale use to buy flannel?

Mail order was pioneered by Pryce Pryce-Jones of Newtown in Wales, who sent Welsh flannel out by post and rail from 1861 and used Nightingale's name as a customer in his advertising.

Nightingale died in her sleep in 1910, aged 90, at her home in which London district?

Mayfair was her base for decades: often confined to bed, she received politicians and other visitors there and kept up a stream of letters and reports.

Which humanitarian organisation awards the Florence Nightingale Medal, the highest honour a nurse can win worldwide?

The International Red Cross, whose founding her wartime work helped inspire, created the medal in 1912 and awards it every two years for exceptional courage and devotion.

International Nurses Day is held each year on the anniversary of which event in Nightingale's life?

Her birth, on 12 May 1820, was fixed on in 1974; an American official had asked President Eisenhower to proclaim a nurses' day back in 1953, and he never did.

On what is the Nightingale Pledge, recited by new US nurses since 1893, modelled?

It is a statement of the ethics and principles of nursing.

On which Bank of England banknote did Nightingale appear from 1975 to 1994?

The £10 note carried her portrait until the early 1990s, when her place went to Charles Dickens, whose drunken nurse had been the stereotype of the trade before her reforms.

Nightingale's voice survives on an 1890 phonograph recording made to raise money for whom?

Veterans of the Light Brigade, many of them by then impoverished, were the cause; on the cylinder she blesses her 'dear old comrades of Balaclava' and hopes her voice will outlast her memory.

Why are photographs of Nightingale so rare?

She objected on principle to being photographed or painted, believing publicity would harm her causes, so an 1858 picture of her reading outdoors, found only in 2006, is a rare survivor.

Which practice, later drilled into every nurse, did Nightingale enforce in her war hospital?

Frequent handwashing was among the hygiene rules she imposed at the war hospital, and her best-known book later told every nurse to wash her hands 'very frequently during the day'.

What was named after Nightingale during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Temporary NHS critical-care hospitals took her name in 2020, her bicentenary year; the first opened in London on 3 April, but it treated only 54 patients before being placed on standby.

When the government offered a warship to bring her home in 1856, what did Nightingale do?

She went home privately instead, dreading the public receptions planned for her: she crossed to England unnoticed and reached her family's home in Derbyshire while the nation was still waiting to cheer her.

What is 3122 Florence, discovered in 1981 and named in Nightingale's honour?

An asteroid several kilometres across, it passed Earth at 7 million km in 2017, the largest to come that close since NASA began tracking them, and radar then showed that it has two small moons.

Who won the BBC's 2002 Greatest Britons poll, in which Nightingale came 52nd?

Winston Churchill won only after a late surge in the final week overtook an engineer who had been leading, pushed to the front by a campaign among students.

Which country's president gives a National Florence Nightingale Award to nurses each year?

India has presented the award since 1973; Nightingale spent decades campaigning for cleaner water, better drainage and famine relief there, arguing that the army's health and the people's went hand in hand.

What was the name of Nightingale's older sister, also named after a place?

Parthenope, named for the Greek colony where Naples now stands, long resisted her sister's wish to nurse; she later became a writer and, as Lady Verney, mistress of Claydon House.

What name did Nightingale give the pet she rescued in Greece in 1850?

Athena went everywhere with her in a specially made pouch, but died just before she sailed for the war in 1854.

Which Hampshire estate, bought by her father when she was a small child, was the Nightingale family's main home?

Embley Park was bought as a warm, sheltered home for most of the year; the family kept Lea Hurst in Derbyshire for the summer months and moved between the two.

What did Nightingale's relatives decline on her behalf after her death in 1910?

Burial in Westminster Abbey was offered along with a national funeral, and both were turned down because she had asked for a quiet and modest farewell.