Tweeting Nightingale, Part Two

In my previous post, I discussed the cultural importance of Twitter and five top Florence Nightingale-related tweets. Before proceeding to my next discussion, a historical analysis of a much-quoted Nightingale quote, a brief introduction to Twitter is in order for those who don’t know or understand the medium.

A Twitter primer

A tweet is a short burst of text—140 characters or less—which anyone with a Twitter account can send via the Internet. It’s a bit like text-messaging the world, with the abbreviated language typical of such communication. I can perch in a “tree” and tweet to the people who choose to follow my tweets. (By way of introduction, every user includes a brief profile.) I can aim a tweet to a specific person in their “tree” by starting my tweet with their name, after first entering the @ symbol, or I can tweet to numerous persons perched in the same tree by entering the # symbol and the name of the “tree” or community.

Tweeting is a bit like text-messaging the world.

It should not be surprising to know that the community #florencenightingale exists, as do #nursinghistory, #twitternurses, #nursesweek, #nurse, and so on. Sometimes, a group of nurses will fly over to a particular tree at a prearranged time and, as they do on #NurChat, all tweet to each other, promoting professional development very much in the spirit of Florence Nightingale. You can also tweet others’ tweets (retweets) and add pictures or media links to tweets. Not surprisingly, I am @alexattewell and I tweet from a kapok tree in the Mexican jungle.

The historical Florence Nightingale quote I mention above and the most popular Nightingale quote on Twitter is “I attribute my success to this—I never gave or took any excuse.” Short quotes are made for Twitter. In fact, they are the currency of Twitter in the sense that anything good gets retweeted and goes viral. Nightingale’s words are right up there; there is an endless quantity of her quotes on Twitter. Because she’s very quotable, she is also very tweetable. I got bored counting how many hundreds of her quotes there are on Twitter, so, to conduct a little survey, I used the first 100 I found and discovered that this single quote accounted for 57 percent.

In-depth tweet analysis

When Florence Nightingale put these words to paper with her steel-nibbed pen and black ink, she was addressing them to her cousin Hilary who, at the time, was helping her with secretarial work related to nurse education. Nightingale provided her cousin a humorous account of being nearly deluged with water because of bad plumbing in the hotel where she was staying, but added that it wasn’t actually so funny in view of the freezing weather. As a result of being “drowned,” as Nightingale put it, she had become ill.

In trying to get to the bottom of the problem, four of the nearest and dearest men in her life had words with the hotel works supervisor, but they were fobbed off with the excuse that it was caused by frost, so nobody was really to blame. When eventually Nightingale herself got hold of the supervisor, she said it was like “reenacting the Crimea on a small scale.” The man confessed that the problem was, indeed, the result of bad workmanship and had nothing to do with the frost! Hence, never taking an excuse. Another thing I like about the quote—“I attribute my success to this—I never gave or took any excuse”—is that Nightingale openly acknowledges her success, and in doing so, also conveys the fact that she is a success in a man’s world.

Today, researchers can view the quote and the eight-page letter it comes from in the British Library’s manuscript reading room, but it’s easier to find the quote reproduced in her biographies. Easier yet on Twitter. Florence Nightingale would be dumbfounded to know that, 142 years after writing a private letter to her cousin Hilary, a portion of it has gone viral on the Internet. I actually do wonder if the British Library staff members are aware that they are holding the source of this most famous of tweets.

In early May, around the time of Nurses Week, there was a peak of Florence Nightingale-quote tweeting and retweeting between nurses and non-nurses, and all permutations thereof. I have chosen to showcase a tweet of the quote by Shawna Allietta, a nursing student from Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia. She retweeted it from a #nursesweek tweet by the publisher of her nursing textbooks.

Note that the tweet, as with many things broadcast via Twitter, is not 100 percent accurate. If you want to see precisely what Florence Nightingale actually said, see page 35 of my book of Florence Nightingale quotes.

Finally, I thank Anja K. Peters, a German nursing history PhD candidate—to clarify, she is German and she is studying German nursing history—for welcoming me recently to Twitter as a fellow Florence Nightingale fanatic.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.