Florence Nightingale, unsung architect
Four years ago, Cynthia Hammond won the Governor-General’s Gold Medal for her outstanding PhD thesis. Now she’s a member of the faculty in the Department of Art History, pushing her research still further.
Her doctoral thesis was about how the city fathers of Bath neglected women, including the “fallen” ones, in their efforts to preserve the city’s prized Georgian-era buildings. She also said that architectural historians tend to overlook such women as Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, who built over 60 buildings in England.
After the success of her thesis, Hammond became interested in 19th-century English women philanthropists. That led to Florence Nightingale — not as the iconic nurse, but as a designer of military medical facilities. Hammond has published a paper about Nightingale’s pivotal role in hospital architecture in a special issue of The Journal of Sociology last summer, and recently gave a talk to the Montreal British History Seminar that provoked lively discussion.
Next to Queen Victoria, Nightingale was the most famous woman of her time, and greatly loved. In fact, she was a war hero. She advanced the British cause in the Crimea by transforming a deathtrap into a hospital that emphasized hygiene, order and the close observation of patients. Her sweeping modifications to Barrack Hospital of Scutari, in what is now Istanbul, saved thousands of lives. Before she undertook her redesign of the building, soldiers were more likely die in the hospital than on the battlefield.
“On her arrival on Nov. 4, 1854, Nightingale set to work on a comprehensive reform of the Barrack, over time translating it from a makeshift hospital to what would be a model of modern nursing, hospital administration and spatial organization. To achieve this transformation, Nightingale continually intervened in the space of the Barrack, establishing and reorganizing wards according to function and degree of casualty.
“She also ordered the construction of rooms, laundry facilities, bathhouses, a reading room for convalescents, special kitchens and organized segregated spaces for the female nurses. The cleanliness of the human body, its bandages, clothing and bedding, were central weapons in her battle, which was not so much against wounds, but against infection and disease.” As a result, the death rate was cut from 578 deaths per 1,000 patients to only 17 per 1,000 patients.
Her first act on returning to England in 1858 was not to start a nursing school, as is commonly believed, but to contribute to a massive report to the government on the sanitary condition of military hospitals.
Hammond says the real testament to Nightingale’s authority was the broad adoption of the pavilion-based hospital, which in her opinion provided maximum efficiency, ventilation and observation. A trained draftsman and statistician as well as a nurse, Nightingale affected hospital design across the world; Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital is an example.
By situating Nightingale firmly in her class — upper middle, and proud of it — and her era, which was frankly imperialist and militarist — Hammond debunks the sentimental image of The Lady of the Lamp who brought feminine softness to the battlefield. Nightingale was a tough cookie, and she opened the way for thousands of middle-class women to follow in her footsteps as active contributors to public health.
While “people have been snide about her miasmic theory, her refusal to believe in germs,” Hammond said, we would do well to reopen windows to let in fresh air, and isolate patients with infections. “As her image has fallen out of favour, we miss a lot of what she had to teach us. I admire her as a powerful, difficult, ambitious, exacting woman.”
Through her work she wants to enrich our understanding of the Victorians in general. “They were very vexed by the city and its effects on moral and physical health. They were utopians, though classist. They believed in civic virtue, in the ideal citizen,” a concept that persists into our own day.