Hugh Pennington is chair of the public inquiry into the 2005 South Wales E.coli outbreak. He lives in Aberdeen.
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Vol. 30 No. 23 · 4 December 2008
pages 33-34 | 2867 words
Beware Bad Smells
Hugh Pennington
- BuyFlorence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend by Mark Bostridge
Viking, 646 pp, £25.00, October 2008, ISBN 978 0 670 87411 8
As a student at St Thomas’s Hospital, I used to walk the long ‘Nightingale’ wards – Florence Nightingale had not only founded its school of nursing but was influential in the design of the building – and learned to avoid prayer-time because the way out was obstructed by the line of ‘Nightingales’ kneeling at the door in order of seniority. And sometimes I watched patients having ECT in Scutari – the psychiatric clinic too was named in her honour.
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Letters
Vol. 30 No. 24 · 18 December 2008
From Mark Bostridge
Hugh Pennington says, ‘Bostridge is no revisionist,’ and goes on to perpetuate some hoary old myths himself (LRB, 4 December). The worst error in his account is his insistence on Nightingale as a miasmatist. In common with most other commentators, stretching back to Lytton Strachey in 1918, Pennington refuses to acknowledge that Nightingale was an eventual convert to germ theory. Certainly by the late 1870s, when Koch published his landmark paper on ‘The Etiology of Traumatic Infectious Diseases’, Nightingale was urging nurses to use antiseptic precautions. She was, above all, a great empiricist, willing and able to accept new evidence as it emerged, and she ought to receive full credit for that.
Mark Bostridge
London NW3
Vol. 31 No. 1 · 1 January 2009
From Hugh Pennington
Mark Bostridge says that I perpetuate a ‘hoary old myth’ by insisting that Florence Nightingale was a miasmatist (Letters, 18 December 2008). But she was. Her utterly miasmatic Notes on Nursing remained in print unchanged until 1901. The only revision she considered, in 1875, was a substantial (and thoroughly miasmatic) addition on sewer gas. Neither can her support for antisepsis in 1882 in Quain’s Medical Dictionary be taken as indicating conversion to a belief in germ theory. She was reflecting current practice – by the late 1870s antisepsis had been enthusiastically adopted at St Thomas’s Hospital, the home of the Nightingale Nursing School. That Lister’s innovation had anything to do with Koch’s version of germ theory is itself a hoary old myth. As Lister’s main disciple, W.W. Cheyne, said in 1882 in his massive book on antiseptic surgery, ‘I have not mentioned the germ theory of infective disease at all. That has no essential bearing on the principles of antiseptic surgery.’
Hugh Pennington
Aberdeen
Vol. 31 No. 2 · 29 January 2009
From Lynn McDonald
Hugh Pennington is quite wrong about Florence Nightingale’s views on germ theory (Letters, 1 January). She explains in her writing on India that Robert Koch’s research on a cholera epidemic in Calcutta in 1883 prompted her rethinking. When Nightingale began work around 1850, germ theory was mere speculation. Even Joseph Lister’s landmark article on aseptic surgery, published in 1867, didn’t refer to specific germs, but to ‘minute organisms suspended’ in the air and ‘floating particles’. Notes on Nursing, which was written in 1859 and never intended for professional nurses, could hardly be expected to contain any discussion of such a subject. Germ theory received rudimentary coverage in lectures at the Nightingale School as early as 1873, and by 1891 she was advocating the use of magic lantern shows at village lectures in India to demonstrate the existence of bacilli, ‘the noxious living organisms in foul air and water’, as a way to encourage villagers to adopt strict hygiene measures.
Lynn McDonald
University of Guelph, Canada
