Florence Nightingale: A Lady With More Than A Lamp

摘要

My seven-year-old has a book about Florence Nightingale. It is a Ladybird Adventures from History book that was first published in 1959 and it depicts an unremittingly saintly woman who, in 1854, answers her life calling by taking a small band of nurses to Scutari to attend to soldiers wounded in the Crimean War. She finds the men cold, filthy and starving-left to rot by blaggardly,rnlazy doctors. She and her nurses scrub the floors, wash the bedclothes and get the wounded into "clean beds in properly disinfected wards", and in just a few days "men who had been in the depths of misery and despair, hoping to die", are "sitting up, cheerful and happy". Their devotion to their saviour, we are told, is such that when she does her rounds at night with her famous lamp, the soldiers kiss her shadow as she passes.