On July 5^th 2021, SoFU director Professor Paul Crawford was one of the 30 invited guests attending the renaming of London Road Community Hospital in Derby as renamed Florence Nightingale Community Hospital. In addition, the current and former chairs of the hospital, Dr Kathy McLean and John Rivers CBE respectively, unveiled a new statue of Florence Nightingale.

Professor Crawford comments: "This is a fitting tribute to the legacy of Florence Nightingale at a time when the NHS has battled through the pandemic. The new statue becomes a sister piece to the one by Lady Feodora Gleichen erected further along London Road in 1914."

Professor Crawford led the AHRC-funded project ‘Florence Nightingale Comes Home’ (AH/R00014X/1) and, with Professor Anna Greenwood, Dr Richard Bates and Dr Jonathan Memel, published an acclaimed new history of her life and work Florence Nightingale at Home (Palgrave,2020). The book has been longlisted for the B.S. Hughes Prize.

"When we started our project on how the material reality and concept of home influenced the life and work of Florence Nightingale, not least in Derbyshire where she lived her early years and intermittently thereafter, we had no idea that the pandemic was about to break out.’ ‘The crossover between what we revealed and the challenges of Covid 19 were uncanny in terms of Nightingale’s approach to health at home but also given that she was largely housebound after returning from the Crimean War in 1856 until her death in 1910." This chimes with recent experience in what has proved ‘the greatest confinement in history’ (Crawford & Crawford, 2020, p.1).

Nightingale endured her own extended lockdown indoors due to the chronic symptoms of brucellosis following infection. In a recent blog, Professor Crawford points out how Nightingale suffered mentally from this prolonged isolation with symptoms of depression and lassitude that mark the folk condition we know as ‘cabin fever’ (Crawford, 2021).  In addition to the book, Florence Nightingale at Home, the project marked the bicentenary of Florence Nightingale's birth in 1820 in a new exhibition ‘Florence Nightingale Comes Home’ at Lakeside, Nottingham. Curated by Hayley Cotterill, the exhibition is open until 5 September 2021.https://www.lakesidearts.org.uk/special-collections/event/5320/florence-nightingale-comes-home.html Further information and resources from the project can be found at www.florencenightingale.org 

References 

Crawford, P. & Crawford, J.O. (2021) Cabin Fever: Surviving Lockdown in the Coronavirus Pandemic. Emerald press.

Crawford, P., Greenwood, A., Bates, R. & Memel, J. (2020) Florence Nightingale at Home. Palgrave: London.

Crawford, P. (2021) Florence Nightingale’s Cabin Fever.

https://www.institutemh.org.uk/news/blog2/florence-nightingale-s-cabin-fever