Florence Nightingale - nursing icon and 'malingerer'

[Sly Saint]

"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."

After her return from the Crimean war hospitals in 1856 she suffered several bouts of illness, and both she and her friends, medical and lay, thought she was dying. From August 1857, when she suffered her first major attack, until 1880 she was an invalid, spending much of her waking hours confined to a couch. An attack at Christmas 1861 left her unable to walk and she remained bedridden for six years.

The nature of the illness that afflicted this precise, energetic, and inquiring woman was not understood then, nor has it been satisfactorily elucidated since. After her death medical opinion favoured the diagnosis of neurasthenia,1 an obsolete term denoting a symptom complex now associated with psychosomatic illness; retrospective diagnoses propose such a condition.2 3 This seems eminently reasonable from a review of the signs and symptoms of her illness: weakness, headache, nausea at the sight of food, breathlessness, tachycardia, palpitations, and precordial pain; furthermore, earlier in life she had a somewhat neurotic disposition.

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

 

[Invisible Woman]

"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."

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.

 

[Sly Saint]

 

[Sly Saint]

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

Florence Nightingale’s specially customised wheelchair, which has been in a US university for over a century, could go on display in London’s Florence Nightingale Museum, if the museum can raise the money to acquire it.

When Florence Nightingale returned to Britain, following the Crimea War, she began to suffer illness, which meant that much of her writing, analysis of statistics and campaigning took place amid bouts of fever, insomnia, exhaustion and depression. The life-changing illness frequently left her bedridden, suffering from chronic fatigue and in need of a wheelchair when she was able to move around her home.

She had a specially customised wheelchair made for her to use at home.

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

 

[Shadrach Loom]

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