This text is part of:
[12]
the light while the family were residing at the beautiful city of Florence, and to this fact she is indebted for her first name.
The family consists of but four members, father, mother, and the two daughters, Parthenope and Florence.
The date of the birth of the younger sister, Florence, is variously given in the slight accounts which have been published of her life; but it was said in the public prints, at the time when her name was on every tongue, that she was born in the same year as Queen Victoria, which was 1819.
Her father is a well-informed and intelligent man, and it was under his guidance that she attained a considerable proficiency in the Latin language and in mathematics, as well as in the usual branches and accomplishments of female education.
Early in life she was conversant with French, German, and Italian; she became also a respectable performer upon the piano; and she had that general acquaintance with science, and that interest in objects of art, which usually mark the intelligent mind.
Even as a little girl she was observed to have a particular fondness for nursing the sick.
She had the true nurse's touch, and that ready sympathy with the afflicted which enables those who possess it to divine their wants before they are expressed.
In England, as in most other densely peopled countries, poverty and disease abound on every side, in painful contrast to the elegance and abundance by which persons of the rank of Miss Nightingale are surrounded.
One consequence of this is, that the daughters of affluence, unless they are remarkably devoid of good feeling, employ part of their leisure in visiting the cottages of the poor, and ministering to the wants of the infirm and the sick.
It was thus that Florence Nightingale began her voluntary apprenticeship to the noble art of mitigating human anguish.
Not content with paying the usual round of visits to the cottages near her father's estate, and giving, here a little soup, and
S. M. Betts and Company. Hartford, Conn. 1871.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.