QI The Book of the Dead

during the war. Without treatment it leads to long-term health problems, consistent with those that Florence Nightingale experienced in later life. From1861 to 1868 she was especially unwell, and had to be carried from room to room. Her own descriptions of her symptoms are terse but telling. In 1863 she complained of ‘over pressure of the brain’; in 1865, it was ‘rheumatism of the spine and right elbow’. That year she also experienced ‘great breathlessness,’ and in 1866 ‘spasms of the lungs’. By 1867, she was ‘bereft of an ounce of strength’ and, in 1868, ‘felt as if the top of my head was blown off’. In 1879, she complained of ‘rapid palpitations’ and ‘ninety hours without sleep’.
    But these physiological symptoms, though undoubtedly real, masked a strong psychological component. Her compulsive attitude to work and desire to hide from the world were the outward expression of an inner turmoil that stretched back deepinto her childhood. Florence’s early life was apparently happy and balanced. Her parents were kind and loving and the family was well off, with houses in Derbyshire, Hampshire and London. Her parents’ home was part of a lively intellectual scene that encompassed theologians, social reformers, historians and artists. The Nightingales were Unitarians, liberal Christians who believed in a single, beneficent God, but also in science and progress. William Nightingale had named his younger daughter Florence after the city of her birth, establishing it for the first time as a popular name for girls. Until then it had been a boy’s name. Her sister, born a year earlier in Naples, got saddled with Parthenope, the Greek name for that city, which (so far at least) has not caught on to the same extent. William undertook the education of his two daughters himself, and it was apparent from the start that Florence was academically exceptional: brilliant at languages, arts and sciences. This, however, was to prove a constant source of tension in her life. For much of it, she was by far the brightest person in any room and she knew it. ‘I must overcome my desire to shine in company,’ she wrote in her diary while still a teenager. She was also attractive. The novelist Mrs Gaskell described her as: ‘tall, willowy in figure, [with] thick shortish rich brown hair, a delicate complexion, and grey eyes that are generally pensive but could be the merriest’. Her profile in The Times makes her sound almost too perfect, ‘a young lady of singular endowments … her attainments are extraordinary’.
    Florence Nightingale didn’t have the horrors of poverty, neglect or abuse to contend with, yet she was plagued by fits of depression and suicidal self-loathing – a typical diary entry reads ‘In my thirty-first year, I see nothing desirable but death’. The source of her unhappiness was her deep sense of being at oddswith the stultifying social requirements and hypocrisy of the world she had grown up in. Far from the stiff-collared, sharp-tongued martinet of popular legend, the young Florence was like the heroine of a Mrs Gaskell or George Eliot novel: fiercely bright, passionate and headstrong. She was desperate to be loved, but couldn’t bear the idea of falling into the same polite, bourgeois trap as her parents:
    It is not surprising that husbands and wives seem so little part of one another. It is surprising that there is so much love as there is. For there is no food for it. What does it live upon – what nourishes it? Husbands and wives never seem to have anything to say to one another. What do they talk about? Not about any great religious, social, political questions or feelings. They talk about who shall come to dinner, who is to live in this lodge and who in that, about the improvement of the place, or when they shall go to London … But any real communion between husband and wife – any descending into the depths of their being, and drawing out thence what they find and comparing it – do we ever dream of such a thing? Yes, we may dream of it during the season of ‘passion,’ but we shall not find it afterwards. We even expect it to go off, and lay our account that it will. If the husband has, by chance, gone into the depths of his being, and found there anything unorthodox, he, oftenest, conceals it carefully from his wife, – he is afraid of ‘unsettling her opinions’ .
     
    This passage is from a book called Cassandra, written when she was in her early