Florence Nightingale Beliefs

146 Words1 Pages
The first influential thinker to delineate nursing values and beliefs, Florence Nightingale based her writings on a mosaic of influences. Nightingale did not distill her philosophical beliefs into a theory, yet rudimentary elements of a grand theory emerge from her writings. The author of this article extracted her philosophical beliefs that ground the environmental theory from her letters, writings, and biographies. Florence Nightingale was deeply rooted in spirituality and profoundly practical, so spiritual pragmatism pervades her ontological foundations (Attewell, 1998), as evidenced by her statements: “Education is to teach men not to know, but to do” (Nightingale, 1873a, p. 576); “The way to live with God is to live with ideals, not merely