William Edward Nightingale
William Edward Nightingale (* 1794 ; † 1874 ), born William Edward Shore, was a British Unitarian . He is the father of Florence Nightingale , a founder of modern nursing, and Frances Parthenope Verney , a British writer. He himself held a few public offices in the 1820s and 1830s, but mostly led the life of a wealthy privateer .
Life
Family life
William Edward Nightingale inherited a considerable fortune from an uncle in 1815 and changed his last name from Shore to Nightingale in accordance with the provisions of the will. In 1811 he met his later wife, who was six years his senior, through her brother, one of his school friends.
William Nightingale and Fanny Smith married in 1818 and toured Europe for two years immediately after they were married. Nightingale's older sister Parthenope was born in Naples in 1819 and named after the Greek name for the city she was born in. Florence Nightingale's place of birth on May 20, 1820 was the Villa Colombaia in Florence . As with their older daughter, the Nightingale couple chose a first name for their young daughter based on the city of birth.
The family returned to Great Britain in the winter of 1820 and initially settled in Lea Hurst in Derbyshire . Fanny Nightingale found the winters there to be too severe and the opportunities to participate in social life too limited. In 1825, William Nightingale also acquired the Embley Park estate in Hampshire , which became the family's main residence.
Fanny and William Nightingale were followers of Unitarianism , a liberal and dogma-free Christian denomination, which, among other things, rejected the doctrine of the Trinity of God. The Unitarian ethos also included a belief in social progress and a moral obligation to society, as well as the great importance attached to service to the community. Letters from the 1830s show that the Nightingale family organized and paid for medical care for the villagers near Lea Hurst during this period. William Nightingale also attached great importance to a good education for his daughters. From 1831 he taught her himself in Latin , Greek , German , French and Italian as well as in history and philosophy . The additionally committed tutor was responsible for teaching drawing and music .
Public offices
William Nightingale had a reputation for being a good and fair landlord to his more than 100 tenants. He was a local board member of the Derbyshire committee responsible for implementing the new Poor Laws passed in 1834 . He was also a justice of the peace in Winchester for several years . In 1835 he ran for a seat in the House of Commons as a member of the Whigs , but was defeated in the elections. He did not apply for any other public office; his fortune allowed him to lead a life as a privateer.
Conflicts with Florence Nightingale
William Nightingale was opposed to his younger daughter Florence's desire to devote herself to nursing. On the one hand, Florence Nightingale's fragile health played a role, but also the bad reputation of nurses around the middle of the 19th century. The nurses who worked in British hospitals in the first half of the 19th century were usually former servants or widows who could not find other employment and were therefore forced to make a living from this work. The reputation of the nurses who cared for the sick in their homes was no better. Charles Dickens caricatured such a nurse in his novel Martin Chuzzlewit , published from 1842 to 1843, in the character of Sairey Gamp, as incompetent, negligent, alcoholic and corrupt. The model of his character was the nurse who temporarily looked after a sick servant in the household of his sponsor and friend Angela Burdett-Coutts . Dickens' depiction felt his readers as so aptly that the black umbrella, the Sairey Gamp habitually carries around with him, the colloquial term Gamp developed. In fact, many of the nurses were drunk and it was common practice to give the nurses alcoholic beverages or money for their purchase as thanks for their services. The reputation that nurses who worked during the night in particular also fulfill the sexual wishes of their patients put the profession close to prostitution . It took Florence Nightingale several years before her parents gave her permission to receive rudimentary training in nursing in the Kaiserswerther Diakonie . However, the parents attached great importance to the fact that the daughter's internship would also be kept secret from close family friends. The decisive factor in their approval was that Florence Nightingale fell into such deep depression after returning from her journey through Egypt and Greece that her parents began to fear for their lives. In 1853, Florence Nightingale was finally able to get her parents' approval to run a small nursing home in London, in which impoverished middle-class women who could not afford private care were taken in. Nightingale received no salary for this job; she lived on the 500 pounds her father paid her as an annual pension. The reputation the nursing home received under her leadership led to Nightingale being discussed as head of nurses at King's College Hospital as early as 1854 . Before taking on this role, however, Florence Nightingale was hired by Sidney Herbert to help with the care of injured British soldiers in the Crimean War . She was supposed to lead a group of nurses who looked after the injured and sick in Scutari ( Üsküdar ) in the central military hospital of the British troops ( Selimiye barracks ).
As early as October 1854, after Nightingale had officially been put in charge of the British nurses, reports about them had appeared in British newspapers and journals which historian Helen Rappaport considered hagiographic and Mark Bostridge an alternative to the "angel in the house" acceptable to the public. , the picture of a perfect wife and mother created by the writer Coventry Patmore .
Family fame
On February 24, 1855, the London Illustrated News published an account of Nightingale visiting patients on the wards with a lamp in hand during the night. This mode of representation, which was repeatedly taken up visually and linguistically in the following weeks and months, developed into part of her personal myth and became a metaphor for an ideal of Christian femininity that she represented in the eyes of the public. The few critical or mocking remarks that appeared in the satirical magazine Punch , among other things , went largely without resonance: Nightingale achieved a fame in Great Britain in the course of 1855 that was only surpassed by Queen Victoria. Both Fanny and Parthenope Nightingale enjoyed Florence's growing fame. They were invited by Queen Victoria to take part in a parade of some troops returning from Crimea. In the spring of 1855 they accepted an evening invitation from Richard Monckton Milnes and were the center of the company. Even Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray asked them about Florence and their work.
For William Nightingale, however, the increasing fame of the family was a curse. The apotheosis of his daughter, as he called it, made him tremble for his own name. Seeing him printed in the newspaper made him disgusted and wished he could hide if someone recognized him on the street or in his club. Neither Lea Hurst nor Embley Park actually offered any retreats. Inquisitive people regularly gathered in the garden around the two country manors to see the home of Florence Nightingale. One afternoon in May 1855 he met an elderly soldier on the grounds around Lea Hurst, who extolled Florence Nightingale and her work so much that William Nightingale wrote a letter to his wife asking: What now? Will she bring the dead to life next? . Only the establishment of the Nightingale Fund, which eventually led to the Nightingale School of Nursing , evidently sparked pride in him too.
After her return, Florence Nightingale lived for several years at the Hotel Burlington in London's West End. She was seriously ill - according to today's view probably a particularly severe case of chronic brucellosis - and lived there largely in seclusion to concentrate on her support in the reform of the British medical system. Her father was one of the few visitors she was welcome. In 1865 he bought her a house on London's South Street.
The last few years
William and Franny Nightingale lived largely alone on their country estate after their older daughter married Sir Harry Verney, 2nd Baronet . William met his daughter Florence on his occasional visits to London. His wife Fanny was now too sick to travel to London.
The couple's growing frailty worried their daughters - both Florence and Parthenope, who had arthritis and rheumatism, were unable to look after their parents. He was particularly concerned about Fanny Nightingale's increasing senile dementia.
On January 5, 1874, William Nightingale came down to breakfast but found that he had forgotten his watch. Going up the stairs, he slipped and fell so miserably on his head that he died instantly.
Lea Hurst and Embley Park fell to their next male heir, a son of William Nightingale's sister Mai, under the terms of the will. William Shore Nightingale also took on Fanny Nightingale.
literature
- Mark Bostridge: Florence Nightingale . Penguin Books, London 2009, ISBN 978-0-14-026392-3
- Monica E. Baly: Florence Nightingale and the Nursing Legacy . Whurr Publishers, London 1997, ISBN 1-86156-049-4
- Barbara Montgomer Dossey: Florence Nightingale - Mystic, Visionary, Healer , Springhouse Corporation, Springhouse 2000, ISBN 0-87434-984-2
- Helen Rappaport: No Place for Ladies - The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War . Aurum Press Ltd, London 2007, ISBN 978-1-84513-314-6
Single receipts
- ^ Dossey, p. 5
- ^ Ann Marriner-Tomey , Martha Raile Alligood: Nursing theorists and their work. Elsevier Health Sciences, 2006, Issue 6, ISBN 0-323-03010-6 , p. 71
- ↑ Bostridge, p. 17
- ^ Bostridge, p. 53
- ^ Bostridge, p. 49
- ↑ Bostridge, p. 43 and p. 44
- ^ Bostridge, p. 94
- ↑ Bostridge, pp. 96-98.
- ↑ Bostridge, pp. 155-156
- ^ Bostridge, p. 156
- ^ Bostridge, pp. 186 and 190
- ^ Dossey, p. 96
- ↑ Rappaport, p. 110
- ^ Bostridge, p. 255
- ↑ Bostridge, pp. 251 and 253
- ↑ Rappaport, p. 94
- ↑ a b c Bostridge, p. 258
- ↑ Quoted from Bostridge, p. 259
- ^ Bostridge, p. 293
- ^ Bostridge, p. 331
- ^ Bostridge, p. 461
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Nightingale, William Edward |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Shore, William Edward (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British Unitarian and father of Florence Nightingale |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1794 |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1874 |