Florence Nightingale and the Medical Men

Book excerpt: Florence Nightingale is known as a hospital reformer, a social reformer, and the founder of professional nursing; few realize that she worked closely with doctors on these issues. As Nightingale’s first supporters and colleagues, doctors contributed to reducing the high death rates in Crimean War hospitals and learned from the consequential reforms. Beginning with an overview of Nightingale’s life and continuing with an exploration of her Crimean War work with army doctors, her post-Crimea work with civilian doctors, and her collaborations with the peacetime army and with army doctors in later wars, Lynn McDonald details the involvement of doctors in Nightingale’s legacy. At a time when hospitals’ death rates were universally high (including at top teaching hospitals), Nightingale formed connections with leading public health doctors and produced heavily cited work on safer hospital design. Her later writings cover her relations with early women doctors and the controversy over state regulation of nurses, bacteriology, and germ theory; here, McDonald argues against flawed secondary literature and the myth of Nightingale’s lifelong opposition to germ theory. The final chapter discusses the legendary nurse’s enduring legacy. Florence Nightingale and the Medical Men provides timely insight into Nightingale’s principles of disease prevention, data visualization, and the impacts of high disease and death rates – issues that persist in the global health crises of the twenty-first century.