Monday's Quote

“How very little can be done under the spirit of fear”. - Florence Nightingale

Given it is Women’s History month, and we are fighting the coronavirus and economic turmoil, I would like to celebrate the accomplishments of Florence Nightingale, nurse and brave woman. Florence Nightingale was a defiant woman who pursued a career in nursing during Victorian times despite her wealthy family forbidding her to do so. She was a fierce reformer, a statistician, fearless in her actions during the Crimea War, and a woman who had unbounded compassion for humankind evidenced through her selfless service and putting her own health at risk to care for others. She defied every Victorian social convention of her time and “craved for some regular occupation, for something worth doing instead of frittering away time on useless trifles.”

Nightingale was a one-woman lobbying group and think tank whose presentations on sanitary conditions persuaded the British military to improve hospitals with the first comprehensive sewage systems for London. She founded England’s first nurses’ training school and worked to repeal laws that punished women only for the spread of venereal diseases on naval bases and garrison towns.

Ms. Nightingale is an inspirational figure who is revered as a hero who overcame everything that life threw at her – her parents’ vehement disapproval, terrible conditions of war hospitals, push back from military men, and yet always demonstrated grace and charity.

Let’s not be fearful but diligently prudent now, and in our lives as women, let’s not let society or parents tell us what we can’t do – we can do anything we set our minds and passions to with dedicated effort and vision!

Many thanks to all the women and men on the front line of the health care system helping our country to address the current virus situation, and, putting themselves at risks to do so. I am grateful for their service ??