The Myth of Florence Nightingale

> Just about every mainstream source, from the History Channel to Wikipedia, cites Nightingale, an upper-class lady of Victorian England, as the founder of modern nursing.

Emphasis mine. The article then elides this detail in order to support several pages of well-written but misdirected polemic.

This is just cheap flamebait:

> "The idea of Nightingale, the lady with the lamp, as the prototypical nurse—this mythic origin story—has served to further white supremacy in nursing..."

It's also bad science history. The first fundamental change in medicine that addressed infectious death rates (and that preceded vaccines and antibiotics) was the use of antiseptics ('carbolic acid' etc.) spearheaded by Joseph Lister in the 1850s and 1860s, which is the practice that Florence Nightingale is associated with (medical hygiene), mythologically or not:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200812-the-pioneering-s...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lister

Also everyone today knows that medical discoveries were not limited to European practitioners of the latter half of the 19th century, e.g. smallpox vaccination etc.

https://royalsociety.org/blog/2020/10/west-africans-and-the-...

Why don't we all try harder to put historical accuracy ahead of ideological posturing? It's generally more interesting, too.