Two hundred years ago, nursing was not seen as respectable work. Hospitals were dirty and dangerous. Many people thought only poor or careless women would do it. A wealthy young woman becoming a nurse was almost unthinkable.
One wealthy young woman did it anyway, because she believed God had asked her to.
A call at sixteen
Florence Nightingale was born in 1820 to a rich English family. When she was sixteen, she wrote in her private notes that God had spoken to her and called her to his service. She did not yet know what that meant.
Over the years, she came to believe the answer was caring for the sick. Her family was horrified and tried to stop her. She kept going. In 1850 she went to Kaiserswerth, in Germany, to train with a community of Christian women who cared for the sick and the poor.
The hospital at Scutari
In 1854, Britain went to war in the Crimea, a peninsula on the Black Sea. Reports reached London that wounded British soldiers were dying in filthy army hospitals with almost no care.
Florence led a group of thirty-eight nurses to the army hospital at Scutari, across the water from what is now Istanbul. What she found was terrible. Men lay in their own dirt. There were rats, too few blankets and almost no clean water. The sewers under the building were broken.
She and her nurses scrubbed floors, washed bandages, cooked food and demanded supplies. At night, she walked the long wards alone with a small lamp, checking on the men. The soldiers called her "the Lady with the Lamp."
In 1855, a government team arrived and fixed the sewers and the water. After that, far fewer soldiers died.
A new kind of nurse
After the war, Florence used numbers and charts to show leaders that clean hospitals saved lives. In 1860, she opened a training school for nurses at St Thomas' Hospital in London. Nursing became a skilled, respected profession.
In 1907, she became the first woman ever given the Order of Merit by the British king. She died in 1910.
Why she did it
She believed caring for the sick was serving Jesus himself, just as he said in his story of the king.
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
Matthew 25:36 · King James VersionThe original Greek
γυμνὸς καὶ περιεβάλετέ με, ἠσθένησα καὶ ἐπεσκέψασθέ με, ἐν φυλακῇ ἤμην καὶ ἤλθατε πρός με.
Found in Codex Vaticanus (about AD 325), Codex Sinaiticus (about AD 350).
What it means for us
Florence was not gentle and quiet all the time. She could be fierce, stubborn and hard to work with. We do not have to pretend she was perfect. But she shows that a calling from God can look like scrubbing floors and arguing for clean water.
If you have ever sat up at night with someone sick, you have done a small piece of what she did. That counts, and God sees it.