Now that the nurses have actually taken to the picket lines, we are unlikely to hear any more about the Florence Nightingale notion of nursing. The thing is finally dead and buried, and few will mourn it (or even its passing).
The FN ideal foisted on the caring profession involved the image of a delightful young lady nurse, immaculately turned out in pale blue blouse and starched full-length white skirt, flitting - and occasionally flirting - through the all-male wards of a charmingly dilapidated Crimean War hospital, dispensing medicine and sympathy in equal measure to injured British war heroes. "Wotta girl," the sick and dying men would groan appreciatively to each other from their beds as she passed by under the cheery light of her famous lamp, "wotta girl".
But this does not really accord with the facts. Florence Nightingale was as tough as old boots. She had to be. The Crimean hospital in which she served at Scutari was a filthy, ill-ventilated, reeking dump, so unsanitary that by spreading disease it caused more deaths than it prevented: its death rate was three times higher than that of the primitive regimental hospitals at the battlefront. And Nightingale - who hated her own reputation as a ministering angel - leaked copies of the secret British government report revealing these unpalatable truths (possibly providing the inspiration for Eric Maschwitz's lyric beginning "A nightingale sang . . . ").
Moreover, Nightingale was an active campaigner for the establishment of proper nursing care and indeed the career of nursing. In order to do this, she had to fight prejudice and vested interests in the British army and in Parliament. She was acknowledged as an expert administrator and statistician. She was a feminist who resisted her parents' efforts to marry her off, and insisted on her own career. "The time is come", she wrote, "when women must do something more than (tend) the domestic hearth."
Yet this is the woman who has been recently disowned by nurses in Britain. In Brighton last April, Unison - the health and ancillary workers' union - voted to ditch Nightingale as the patron saint of nurses: delegates supported a demand that International Nurses' Day be moved from Nightingale's birthday, May 12th, to a "more appropriate" date. One speaker, a nurse and health visitor, said that the Nightingale legacy had held back the nursing profession for too long. Moreover, she was "white, middle-class and Protestant, which was not reflective of today's nurses." A suggestions was then made that the Jamaican herbalist, Mary Seacole, who also served in the Crimea, would be more appropriate for today's multicultural mix in modern nursing.
Had Ms Seacole also been a one-legged single mother, her selection as a role model would probably have been instantaneous. Florence Nightingale was also denigrated at the Unison conference for helping to nurture the belief that nursing is a "vocation". No doubt she did, but certainly not in the sense of a Divine calling. She hadn't a lot of time for God or godliness (though she was a stickler for cleanliness). She expressed the belief that while God might save souls on the other side, she would do her best to save human lives on this side. There is no indication anywhere that she felt nurses should accept poor pay and conditions because they were called on by God to do a special job. But she did believe that nursing was a deeply satisfying career, and she took immense pride in her work.
It is no harm, however, to ditch the notion that a nursing career is a vocation in the way that a career as a Eurobond trader isn't. Historically we were given to believe in this country that God does not "call" people to make money for its own sake, or to set up a factory, or go into advertising, or become politicians, or manufacture clothes, or even write for respected newspapers. This notion used to leave those of us who hadn't got the call to the priesthood or the nursing profession (never mind the call to training) feeling terribly inadequate, and guilty. Now that we are all agreed there is no such thing as a vocation, only the notion of personal and financial fulfilment at any cost, we are surely bound to be happier.
Incidentally, Florence Nightingale was so notoriously intolerant of feebleness and inefficiency, and so good at knocking heads together in order to have sensible decisions reached at short notice, that Queen Victoria remarked "I wish we had her at the War Office." Some might wish we had her in our own Department of Health today, preferably at a fairly high level.