Florence Nightingale died 100 years ago yesterday.

Florence had an experience at the age of 17 when, “God spoke to me, and called me to his service.”

Back then, nursing wasn’t a very respectable profession. Hospitals were famous mainly for bad smells and frightening death rates.

Despite family protests, Florence became a nurse anyway. By 1853, she was superintendent of London’s “Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen”.

She and 38 of her trainees went to Turkey to nurse soldiers injured in the Crimean War.

At first, recovery rates didn’t improve much – but after the hospital’s sewers and ventilation were fixed they did.

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Back in England, Florence published a book, “Notes on Nursing”, covering what professional nurses needed to learn, plus “everyday sanitary knowledge . . . which every one ought to have.”

She wrote, altogether, 17 books on medical topics.

Plus another, 829 pages long, entitled “Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth.”

Due to health problems, Florence spent much of the second half of her life bed-ridden.

But she remained a great organiser, intellectual and author.

She died at the age of 90.

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Florence made her nurses recite a pledge:

I solemnly pledge myself before God and in the presence of this assembly, to pass my life in purity and to practise my profession faithfully.

I will abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous, and will not take or knowingly administer any harmful drug.

I will do all in my power to maintain and elevate the standard of my profession, and will hold in confidence all personal matters committed to my keeping and all family affairs coming to my knowledge in the practice of my calling.

With loyalty will I endeavor to aid the physician, in his work, and devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care.

When young, Florence worked in a Paris hospital staffed by nuns. She wore the postulant habit, but never became a nun herself.

She never became a Catholic. She told Cardinal Manning that she wished to, but he said no, as she didn’t accept some Catholic beliefs.

Florence Nightingale is venerated as a Saint in the Episcopal Church, but not in the Catholic Church.

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A phonograph recording of Florence’s voice, made in 1890, has been preserved. She sounds a bit like Queen Elizabeth II:  www.archive.org/details/FlorenceNightingaleVoice