Florence Nightingale's Little Owl

My post of July 23, 2014, titled "Athena's Little Owl," mentioned Athena noctua, an owl known to frequent the Athenian Acropolis from at least the Archaic Era (and so presumably much earlier) to the present day. The image of the owl was imprinted on the silver tetradrachm, first minted in 526 BCE.

For a work of fiction that I am writing, I recently did some research on Florence Nightingale (1820 to 1910), founder of the modern nursing profession.

In 1850, she traveled to Italy, Greece, Egypt, and Germany. During her visit to the Parthenon in Athens, she rescued an Athena noctua owlet from mischievous children. She hand-fed it, trained it to bow and curtsy, and kept it as her pet for the next five years. While she was in Germany, she visited Pastor Theodore Fliedner’s hospital and observed his school for deaconesses at Kaiserswerth near Dusseldorf.

In 1851, she returned to the German school for three months' training. Afterward, she began her nursing career in England.

In 1854, she was recruited to train nurses for duty in Turkish hospitals during the Crimean War. She was getting ready to leave with her nurses the following year, and the owl, left in her attic in the care of unreliable family members, died of neglect. Heartbroken, Nightingale had the owl stuffed and kept it in her home ever after. You can see the stuffed owl today in the Florence Nightingale Museum in London.

(To us, stuffing the owl may seem like a rather ghoulish way of honoring her pet, but it was in keeping with the sensibilities of the Victorian Era.)

In the Crimea, she became known as the "Lady with the Lamp," for she made nightly rounds to check on her patients.

Nightingale laid down the principles and practices of modern nursing. No longer were nurses untrained in sanitation, nutrition, wound care, and other important health fields; they became professional, knowledgeable caregivers. In 1859, she wrote Notes on Nursing and, in 1860, she founded the Nightingale Training School for nurses at St. Thomas Hospital in London.

Within five years, Nightingale Nurses took over the nursing duties in workhouse infirmaries in England and Ireland and, within seventeen years, Nightingale Nurses headed up wards as Matrons all over the United Kingdom.

In the following years, she undertook studies in public health and the health of men in military service and won membership as the first woman in the Royal Statistical Society for her use of modern graphics, such as the pie chart, to present her data. In 1883, she earned the Royal Red Cross. In 1904, she was appointed a Lady of Grace of the Order of St John (LGStJ). In 1907, three years before her death, she became the first woman to win the Order of Merit.