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December 23, 2006
Florence Nightingale
This is a Christmas message (although I'm sure Mr Grimsdyke will appear as the snow falls on Bloggington beach)
Along with John Delane, the sadly neglected but heroic editor of the Times in the 1850's, Miss Nightingale is without doubt one of my inspirations for this attempt to rescue our public library service. There are many reasons-- one of them is that she had a fierce and unbending dislike of civil service evasions- and they fired her into vehement action, as they do me.
But for Christmas there is a story and a message. The story is that at Christmas 1854 she was witness to one of the most appalling but English horrors of all time in the hospitals at Scutari and in her letters home she cried to her father about how much she missed him- when by so doing she was building within herself the incredible strength she later displayed. Those letters are the saddest reading I have ever encountered. Cold, destroyed, weary, and truly made mad to the point of insanity by what she saw- she displays a human being at its most frail but still surviving.
The message is that from all this she learned many things and they became part of her teachings. One of the most important is that to be trained, to be educated, to be responsible (as she expected both nurses and civil servants to be)- you have to read widely and deeply. That, she believed is what education means-- to hear the experience of others by virtue of what is written in books.
Posted by Tim Coates at December 23, 2006 3:39 PM