NIGHTINGALE, FLORENCE (1820–1910), is remembered as a nurse, yet she wrote in her seventies that, when planning her future as a young woman, her one idea was not to organize a hospital but to organize a religion. Nursing researchers, sociologists, and scholars of religion, who are now examining Nightingale's voluminous but previously unpublished ideological and religious writings, are discovering the truth of these words.

Nightingale's Life

Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, the second daughter of William and Frances Nightingale, members of the upper class from Derbyshire, England. Although Florence Nightingale was raised in the Church of England, her Cambridge-educated father instilled in her his Unitarian heritage while tutoring her in many languages, history, science, and philosophy. The young Nightingale disdained her privileged life, preferring to help the village poor. At age seventeen she received a call to serve God. Encountering family resistance, she bided her time, studying...