SOURCE: "Florence Nightingale," in Portraits and Personalities, edited by Mabel A. Bessey, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933, pp. 116-32.

In the following essay, Bradford details the difficulties Nightingale encountered and overcame in her career as a reformer.

If there was ever a human being who was possessed by an Ideal that drove her, and whipped and scourged her into the arena, to fight and to struggle for it gallantly until she died, that human being was Florence Nightingale.

Florence was born in the city of that name, the City of Flowers, on May 12, 1820. She was brought up in aristocratic surroundings, with all the comfort and luxury that wealth could supply, so that even in girlhood her analytical temper was driven to cry, "Can reasonable people want all this? Is all that china, linen, glass necessary to make man a progressive animal?" From childhood she traveled widely, saw the habits and...