Florence Nightingale Trivia
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49 free Florence Nightingale trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Florence Nightingale trivia quiz covers the woman named after the Italian city of her birth who defied her wealthy family to become a nurse. It follows the call from God at sixteen, the pet owl from Athens, the training at Kaiserswerth, the 38 nurses who sailed to Scutari in 1854, the lamp and the hammer, the sanitary campaigns and coxcomb diagrams that came after, the nursing school at St Thomas', the decades spent bedridden but phenomenally productive, and the honours, banknotes, hospitals and asteroid that carry her name. The easy questions are ones most people know: her nickname, her war, her profession. The medium ones ask about her family, her training, Scutari, her books and her statistics. The hard ones dig into Sidney Herbert, Mary Seacole, the Renkioi hospital, Cassandra, the 1890 phonograph recording, the Order of Merit and the rare photographs. It suits a nursing-school icebreaker, a Victorian history round or International Nurses Day. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01By what nickname did Florence Nightingale become famous during her wartime nursing?
The Lady with the Lamp
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.
Q 02Nightingale nursed soldiers wounded in Britain's war against which country?
Russia
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.
Q 03Why was Nightingale, an English gentleman's daughter, born in Florence?
A honeymoon tour
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.
Q 04What was Nightingale's father's surname at birth, before he inherited an estate?
Shore
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.
Q 05Which subject, unusual for a girl of her time, did Nightingale study at home and later use in her reforms?
Mathematics
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.
Q 06What did Nightingale, aged sixteen, record receiving in February 1837?
A call from God
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.
Q 07Why did Nightingale turn down the politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes after a long courtship?
Her vocation
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.
Q 08Which politician, a friend of Nightingale since they met in Rome in 1847, sent her out to the war hospitals?
Sidney Herbert
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.
Q 09What kind of pet did Nightingale rescue in Greece in 1850 and keep as an inseparable companion?
A little owl
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.
Q 10At which German religious community did Nightingale train as a nurse in 1851?
Kaiserswerth
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.
Q 11Before the war, Nightingale ran a small hospital in London's Harley Street for which patients?
Sick gentlewomen
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.
Q 12Nightingale's war hospital stood far from the Crimea, across the Black Sea in a suburb of which city?
Constantinople
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.
Q 13Which engineer was commissioned to design a prefabricated hospital after Nightingale's plea to The Times?
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Q 21What is the title of Nightingale's best-known book, which became the core text at her own training school?
Notes on Nursing
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.
Q 22In 1865 the first trained Nightingale nurses were sent to Liverpool to care for which patients?
Workhouse paupers
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.
Q 23Which gin-drinking Dickens nurse was said to be only a mild exaggeration of nursing before Nightingale?
Sarah Gamp
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.
Q 14What killed far more soldiers in Nightingale's war hospital than their wounds did?
Disease
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.
Q 15What did the Sanitary Commission do at Scutari in March 1855 that sharply cut deaths?
Flushed the sewers and improved ventilation
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.
Q 16Which Jamaican-born nurse ran the 'British Hotel' for soldiers in the Crimea during the war?
Mary Seacole
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.
Q 17What did soldiers call Nightingale after she broke into a locked store for medicines?
The lady with the hammer
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.
Q 18Which American poet's 1857 poem 'Santa Filomena' helped popularise Nightingale's nickname?
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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.
Q 19At which London hospital did Nightingale open her training school for nurses in 1860?
St Thomas' Hospital
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.
Q 20Who paid for the nursing school Nightingale opened in 1860?
The public, through a fund
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.
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.
Q 24Which American, mentored by Nightingale in the 1870s, is called 'America's first trained nurse'?
Linda Richards
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.
Q 25In 1907 Nightingale became the first woman to receive which honour?
The Order of Merit
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'.
Q 26What type of chart did Nightingale use to show what was killing soldiers?
The polar area diagram, or 'rose diagram'
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.
Q 27Of which learned body did Nightingale become the first female member?
The Royal Statistical Society
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.
Q 28During which war did the United States government ask Nightingale for advice on caring for its soldiers?
The American Civil War
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.
Q 29What is the title of Nightingale's best-known feminist essay, named for a woman of Greek myth?
Cassandra
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.
Q 30Which 1918 book by Lytton Strachey gave Nightingale a chapter of her own?
Eminent Victorians
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.