How was Florence Nightingale a creative person?

Introduction

Creativity has been described as a “core leadership competence”, an “essential component of effective organizational leadership”, and a “crucial qualification” for leaders. Although human creativity has been a source of fascination and speculation for centuries, it did not become a focus of rigorous academic study until the 1950s. Since then, a multiplicity of approaches to creativity have arisen, most of which are rooted in specific academic disciplines. Researchers identify seven major approaches to the study of creativity: mystical approaches, pragmatic approaches, psychodynamic approaches, psychometric approaches, cognitive approaches, social-personality approaches, and confluence approaches. The life of Florence nightingale is full of creativity. She through her creative insights worked in the field of nursing and spent all her life to bring positive changes in nursing. Even before her death, Florence Nightingale was known not only as a founder of modern nursing but also as one of the major figures in hospital reform in the 19th century. Though The London Times proclaimed her heroism for the saving of British casualties during the Crimean War (she was perhaps the only British hero to emerge from that conflict), it was her work subsequent to the war that secured the historical legacy that we still contend with today. In some ways the popular story of Nightingale as creating the first modern nurses—if not fashioned certainly encouraged by Nightingale and her supporters—has changed little over the course of the century. Though Lytton Strachey exposed the world to a Nightingale different from the admired heroine, demonizing her in his 1918 Eminent Victorians, her public persona survives mostly unscathed. (Weiner, 274)

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, for example, placed her in their “Health Heroes” series, preserving her image intact, though some influence can be detected from Strachey's work. “In the popular imagination,” wrote Grace Hallock and C. E. Turner, “she was the Lady of the Lamp, the Angel of the Crimea, the tender woman whose shadow the soldiers kissed as it fell on their pillows.” But, they said, there was another side to her; she was also “an angel with a flaming sword. Her mind was the sword … Ruthlessly she bared the easy-going inefficiency which hitherto had made a disgrace of sanitation and nursing, both in military and civil life.” She was both nurse and reformer. The recent online edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica defines her primarily as a “nurse and the founder of trained nursing as a profession for women,” placing less emphasis on the other important aspects of her life.

However, both Florence Nightingale and the changes in health care which she spearheaded and inspired are far more complex, as recent scholarship has made clear. To this end, the body of this article will proceed in three parts. It will first examine her life to the point when she returned to England from the Crimea. The second section will contextualize her reforms in hospitals and nursing. The third section will discuss her use of statistics, especially as a tool of ...