Florence Nightingale: Her Impact On Nursing And Colonialism

Florence Nightingale was born in 1820 into Britain's elite, and that shaped everything that followed. Her father was a wealthy white landowner and merchant who, unusually for the era, gave his daughter a classical education in Italian, French, and German. Most young women born in the early 1800s were not educated at all. Against her parents' wishes, she trained as a nurse at the Lutheran hospital in Kaiserswerth, Germany.

She went on to advance nursing as a profession and to reshape public health. But her legacy has largely been told through a white cultural lens, and that telling leaves out her role in the colonization of nursing. Over the past decade, as her writings were digitized, references to her belief in the supremacy of white culture became far easier to find.

Nightingale's role in colonialism

Nightingale's advances in healthcare and her racism are both part of the record. In "Sanitary Statistics of Native Colonial Schools and Hospitals," she described Indigenous children in the Canadian forerunner to residential schools as inferior, and she had no issue with the high death rate among them: "Every society which has been formed has had to sacrifice large proportions of its earlier generation to the new conditions of life arising out of the mere fact of change." She went on to blame the deaths on Indigenous people themselves, framing British rule as merely triggering a "decay" their own habits had already begun.

Her statements on New Zealand led the New Zealand Nurses Organisation to call her colonial views a "dangerous legacy" and to cancel celebrations of her 200th birthday.

These were not private opinions. At the height of her fame after the Crimean War, she counseled political figures and supported policies that contributed to the deaths of Indigenous people. Her outsized reputation has also overshadowed contemporaries such as Mary Seacole, Charlotte Edith Monture, and Mary Mahoney, who challenged the racist and sexist norms of their time.

Nightingale also helped colonize the profession itself. The elitism and deference she built into nursing education shaped what became known as the "European style of nursing," in which nurses have little independent practice and function as an extension of the physician.

10 facts about Nightingale's influence on modern nursing

Decolonizing nursing means holding both legacies at once: her real contributions and the harm her prejudices caused. Bias and unequal access still affect the quality of care in Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color, on a foundation she helped lay.

1. She established the first science-based nursing school

By 1860 the Nightingale Fund, raised by public subscription, had reached about 45,000 British pounds. Nightingale used it to found the Nightingale Training School for Nurses at St. Thomas' Hospital in London. She also influenced training for midwives and nurses in workhouse infirmaries, institutions that put the indigent to profitable work.

2. She played a political role under British rule

She advised key political figures and backed British colonialism despite the destruction it caused, even as some contemporaries spoke against it. Mary Seacole, a British-Jamaican nurse whose help Nightingale rejected during the Crimean War, asked: "Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?" Nightingale held that doing otherwise would be "simply preserving their barbarism for the sake of preserving their lives."

3. She opposed higher education for nurses

Despite founding a training school, Nightingale resisted higher education that promoted women's autonomy. She tied nursing to traditional female virtues of endurance, obedience, and cleanliness, treating it as an extension of women's role in society in a way that limited their education and reinforced male dominance.

4. She advised colonial authorities in New Zealand and Australia

As an adviser to the Governor of New Zealand and to authorities elsewhere, she promoted the forced migration of Maori into European settlements: "The object should be to draw them gradually into better habits and gradually to civilize them."

5. She held the miasma theory of disease until her death

This theory blamed disease on bad smells and filth. Nightingale held it until she died in 1910. Treating disease as the fault of Indigenous people, she dismissed reports of influenza outbreaks in Indigenous communities after European contact and attributed population decline to what she believed were their inherent defects.

6. The Lady With the Lamp

Soldiers in the Crimean War gave her the name. After spending her days making sure the hospital was clean and the men were cared for, she walked the wards at night carrying a lamp. The soldiers were comforted by her, and the death rate at the hospital fell significantly during the period of her reforms.

7. Cleanliness next to godliness

Like many Victorians, Nightingale believed cleanliness was next to godliness, and she was among the first to practice diligent handwashing, still the single most effective way to prevent the spread of disease. She also used the idea to blame the poor and Indigenous people for their own illness: "When we obey all God's laws as to cleanliness ... health is the result. When we disobey, sickness."

8. She sparked the Royal Commission on the health of the army

After the Crimean War she compiled an 830-page report, "Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army," proposing reforms that restructured the War Office's administrative department and created the Royal Commission tasked with investigating the army's sanitary conditions.

9. Her elite upbringing shaped her colonial ideology

Her ideas grew out of her privileged background. But other elites of her era rejected colonial attitudes and became advocates against racism and sexism. Nightingale had that choice too, and instead embraced the ideals that brought death and destruction to Indigenous communities and people of color.

10. She made nursing an honorable vocation

After the Crimean War she returned a heroine and a figure of public admiration. Young women, including those from the upper class, enrolled in her training school, and nursing rose to the status of an honorable profession.