Florence Nightingale in letters

This pen set belonged to Florence's cousin Marianne Nicholson. She would have used it to write all her letters to Florence when she was young.

The set contains a pen with nibs, ink, a pen wipe, a seal engraved with 'MN' and a stick for rubbing paper ready for a wax seal.  

These pages are excerpts from the description of the vision that Florence Nightingale received from God when she was sixteen years old. 

Traditionally the story is that Nightingale had the vision sat on her seat in the garden under the cedars of Lebanon trees, but later she revealed to family it happened in her bedroom at her family home in Embley Park, Hampshire.  

This experience was the reason and what gave her faith and strength to carry on regardless of opposition throughout her whole life.    

When Florence and Marianne were children they often played with dolls. This assortment of little porcelain dolls belonged to Marianne Nicholson. She used to carry them around in a homemade purse in her pocket so that the cousins could play with them anywhere.

This watercolour by Florence's sister Frances shows Florence accompanying Laura Nicholson on the piano in the Nightingale’s drawing room at Embley Park.

This is the bench at Embley Park where Marianne and Florence read Jocelyn , a story written in French verse about the life a young priest living in the late 1700s.    

On the 26 August 1851 Marianne Nicholson married Douglas Galton. Captain Douglas Galton was the father of Gwendolen Gascoigne of Lotherton Hall. He was a prestigious Victorian engineer, who from 1869 to 1875 was the Director of Public Works and Buildings.

Douglas Galton became Nightingale’s right-hand man on hospital design. He would consult her when designs and plans were submitted to him. Galton incorporated her recommendations to make sure that the buildings would be fit for both the sanitary needs of the patient and the need for nurses to work efficiently.

Prominent surgeons and doctors would often write to Sir Douglas. This letter was written by Dr John B. Hellier to Sir Douglas, expressing interest in the plans for a hospital for women in Leeds.

When Nightingale was in the Crimea she learned the terrible truth that almost 80% of British deaths during the conflict were caused by infection rather than on the battlefield. Nightingale attributed this to poor ventilation and hygiene.  

Nightingale saw that wounded men were sleeping in overcrowded, dirty rooms without any blankets. Wounded soldiers often arrived with diseases like typhus, cholera and dysentery. More men died from these diseases than from their injuries.

Images of doctors with bloody aprons going from one patient straight to another without even washing their hands were common in Nightingales day. One of Florence Nightingale’s goals was to make hospitals clean and hygienic spaces with minimum risk of cross infection.

Lacking in Nightingale's knowledge of the spread of infection, the Leeds surgeons were suggesting, in their cost effective planning, that the nurses could be accommodated in the same building with the patients in the maternity ward (Lying–in ward). Nightingale with her knowledge of cross contamination from experience in the Crimea, knew this was a bad idea.   

Leeds General Infirmary was eventually built using Nightingale's pavilion plan. Which was patterned on Sir Douglas Galton’s design of the Herbert military hospital at Woolwich and the planned St Thomas’s hospital on the embankment in London. Because of this, the new Leeds Infirmary would cost four times more than a traditional hospital built on the block plan.