universe and apply them to achieve well-being. In
Notes on Nursing(1860/1969, p. 25), she wrote:
God lays down certain physical laws. Upon his carry-
ing out such laws depends our responsibility (that
much abused word)....Yet we seem to be continually
expecting that He will work a miracle—i.e. break his
own laws expressly to relieve us of responsibility.Influenced by the Unitarian ideas of her father
and her extended family, as well as by the more tra-
ditional Anglican church she attended, Nightingale
remained for her entire life a searcher of religious
truth, studying a variety of religions and reading
widely. She was a devout believer in God.
Nightingale wrote: “I believe that there is a Perfect
Being, of whose thought the universe in eternity is
the incarnation” (Calabria & Macrae, 1994, p. 20).
Dossey (1998) recasts Nightingale in the mode of
“religious mystic.” However, to Nightingale, mysti-
cal union with God was not an end in itself but was
the source of strength and guidance for doing one’s
work in life. For Nightingale, service to God was
service to humanity (Calabria & Macrae, 1994, p.
xviii).
In Nightingale’s view, nursing should be a search
for the truth; it should be a discovery of God’s laws
of healing and their proper application. This is
what she was referring to in Notes on Nursingwhen
she wrote about the Laws of Health, as yet uniden-
tified. It was the Crimean War that provided the
stage for her to actualize these foundational beliefs,
rooting forever in her mind certain “truths.” In the
Crimea, she was drawn closer to those suffering in-
justice. It was in the Barracks Hospital of Scutari
that Nightingale acted justly and responded to a
call for nursing from the prolonged cries of the
British soldiers (Boykin and Dunphy, 2002, p. 17).
War
I stand at the altar of those murdered men and while
I live I fight their cause.
—Nightingale, cited in Woodham-Smith (1983)Nightingale had powerful friends and had
gained prominence through her study of hospitals
and health matters during her travels. When Great
Britain became involved in the Crimean War in
1854, Nightingale was ensconced in her first official
nursing post at 1 Harley Street. Britain had joined
France and Turkey to ward off an aggressive
Russian advance in the Crimea (Figure 5–2). A suc-
cessful advance of Russia through Turkey could
threaten the peace and stability of the European
continent.
The first actual battle of the war, the Battle of
Alma, was fought in September 1854. It was written
of that battle that it was a “glorious and bloody vic-
tory.” The best technology of the times, the tele-
graph, was to have an effect on what was to follow.
In prior wars, news from the battlefields trickled
home slowly. However, the telegraph enabled war
correspondents to telegraph reports home with
rapid speed. The horror of the battlefields was
relayed to a concerned citizenry. Descriptions of
wounded men, disease, and illness abounded.
Who was to care for these men? The French
had the Sisters of Charity to care for their sick
and wounded. What were the British to do?
(Woodham-Smith, 1983; Goldie, 1987).
The minister of war was Sidney Herbert,
Lord Herbert of Lea, who was the husband of
Liz Herbert; both were close friends of Nightingale.
Herbert had an innovative solution: appoint Miss
Nightingale and charge her to head a contingent of
nurses to the Crimea to provide help and organiza-
tion to the deteriorating battlefield situation. It was
a brave move on the part of Herbert. Medicine and
war were exclusively male domains. To send a
woman into these hitherto uncharted waters was
risky at best. But, as is well known, Nightingale was
no ordinary woman, and she more than rose to the
occasion. In a passionate letter to Nightingale, re-
questing her to accept this post, Herbert wrote:Your own personal qualities, your knowledge and
your power of administration, and among greater
things, your rank and position in society, give you ad-
vantages in such a work that no other person pos-
sesses. (Dolan, 1971, p. 2)At the same time, such that their letters actually
crossed, Nightingale wrote to Herbert, offering her
services. Accompanied by 38 handpicked “nurses”
who had no formal training, she arrived on
November 4, 1854, to “take charge” and did not re-
turn to England until August 1856.
Biographer Woodham-Smith and Nightingale’s
own correspondence, as cited in a number of
sources (Cook, 1913; Huxley, 1975; Goldie, 1987;
Summers, 1988; Vicinus & Nergaard, 1990), paint
the most vivid picture of the experiences that42 SECTION II Evolution of Nursing Theory: Essential Influences