Florence Nightingale - nursing icon and 'malingerer'

"It is a sad irony that Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), the founder of modern nursing, who made such important contributions to public health through her advocacy of sanitation, statistics, and common sense, should also be remembered as history's most famous invalid and possibly as its most successful malingerer."

http://www.bmj.com/content/311/7021/1697.full behind a paywall


Brucellosis and Psychology: Nightingale’s “depression.”
"Until the mid-1900s it was common to attribute Nightingale’s collapse in 1857 and subsequent indisposition to overwork, with a sexist implication that women should not try to work hard. Then in 1974 Pickering, a physician, concluded that Nightingale’s illness was largely psychosomatic."

"The most negative assessment of Nightingale was that of Smith, a sociologist, in 1982. He wrote that Nightingale faked her symptoms, went for ‘surreptitious’ walks in the park when she was supposed to be bedridden, etc. Smith’s assessment of her physical symptoms was that they were too sporadic and varied to fit any organic disease, hence they must be faked."

"The next diagnosis comes from Dr. David Young, a former principal scientist at the Wellcome Foundation, who evidently is an admirer of Miss Nightingale and wrote his article in the British Medical Journal in 1995 [see above] as a reaction against Smith’s negative view. Young was the first to propose an organic illness as the cause of Nightingale’s invalidism. He showed that her varied and intermittent physical symptoms resembled a chronic form of brucellosis infection, so that Smith was therefore wrong to conclude that faking was the only explanation."

"......pattern of her symptoms. As you can see, she was unable to walk for a period of six years in the 1860s, and the other physical symptoms are more sporadic over a period of fifteen years. In the Crimea in 1855 she had a serious attack of fever, with brief delusions, which could have been the first onset of the infection."

"Young only needed to show that neurosis or faking are not the only explanations for her physical symptoms. If he succeeded in showing that there was an organic illness that could have caused her sporadic and varied symptoms, it wouldn’t prove that she had it, and it
wouldn’t disprove Smith’s theory of faking or Pickering’s psychosomatic theory, but it would make it clear that they were pure speculation."

"So it’s pretty clear that she did have an attack of brucellosis. But an attack of brucellosis only rarely leads to an extended period of chronic symptoms, so it’s still only a speculative diagnosis of her later symptoms."
"The narrative purpose of “depression”
What narrative purpose is served by speculation that she suffered from a 25-year-long chronic depression caused by brucellosis?"

http://www.florence-nightingale-avenging-angel.co.uk/DiagnosisThatWasnt.pdf

more info on brucellosis of the nervous system
http://www.medlink.com/article/brucellosis_of_the_nervous_system

 

Now, to be fair, they had no problem with women overworking themselves cleaning houses for the gentry or in mills.

Interesting that women are only susceptible when doing a job that a man might like to do or that might confer some status.

 

Campaign seeks to return Florence Nightingale’s customised wheelchair to the UK

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/article...ised-wheelchair-could-return-to-the-uk-60414/

 

She popularised the pie chart? Stephen Few’s essay linked below explains better than I can why this was unforgivable behaviour, but in summary: bar charts, line graphs and simple tables are always preferred.

https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/save_the_pies_for_dessert.pdf