July 22, 2010 - Off the Charts

Parting Thoughts: 10 Lessons Learned from Florence Nightingale’s Life

The final post in a series by Susan Hassmiller, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Senior Adviser for Nursing, sent to us as dispatches from her summer vacation spent retracing Florence Nightingale’s influential career. The full series can be found by clicking here.

My husband has called this trip a “game changer” for me, and indeed it has been. I see things differently now, including our health care system . . . and the critical contributions that nurses are making, and need to continue making, to improve care for patients. Of course, I always knew this, but somehow this ups the ante for me—and I will use my new education to up the ante for nurses. I have learned so much, but let me share these 10 lessons I gleaned from Ms. Nightingale.

1. Never, ever stop learning.

A broad education in the arts and sciences helps with critical thinking and making important connections that lead to action. I saw how Florence used her knowledge of math, statistics, sanitation, religion, and architecture to put a holistic plan together to improve the systems that care for patients.

2. Ground yourself and your work in facts and evidence.

Make your case indisputable. Everyone should do this . . . not just those who call themselves “researchers.”

3. Muster the courage to follow your convictions.

Step beyond what you think you can do.

4. Treat every person holistically.

Every person has […]

Guest Author2026-05-07T12:08:10-04:00July 22nd, 2010|nursing history|10 Comments

Scutari: A Blog Post Will Never Do Justice To This Visit

This is the second to last in a series of posts by Susan Hassmiller, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, that chronicle her summer vacation spent retracing Florence Nightingale’s influential career.

Scutari was a “tragedy of epic proportions of which bureaucratic muddle and sheer human incompetence played the larger part, thrown in with a measure of bad luck.”

–Mark Bostridge, from his book, Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon

The Hospital: What Florence Experienced
It is almost incongruent that a woman who wrote more than 14,000 letters and 200 books said upon arriving at Scutari Hospital, a converted army barracks, that she was without words to describe what she saw. Of course, as time caught up with her, the words flowed quite freely. Death and mutilation surrounded her in this well-known deathtrap. Her nurses slept (“in catnaps”) in cramped quarters. Men were cramped into rooms and spilled out into the long corridors as they lay on straw beds on cold stone floors. Attendants had to walk over the men who were, by Nightingale’s command, a requisite 18 inches apart. More men died than lived.