“I can’t say precisely how nature exerts its calming and organizing results on our brains,” the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote within the dawning years of the twenty-first century, “however I’ve seen in my sufferers the restorative and therapeutic powers of nature and gardens, even for individuals who are deeply disabled neurologically.”
This, nevertheless, was not a novel thought. A century and a half earlier than him, one other visionary of what we flatly time period drugs — the stewardship of that intersectional surprise transpiring between the human physique and the human spirit — arrived on the identical conclusion.
“No extra infantile issues… No extra marriage,” Florence Nightingale (Could 12, 1820–August 13, 1910) resolved in her diary on her thirtieth birthday.
Inside a decade, she had invented skilled nursing, based the world’s first non-religious nursing college, and revolutionized each healthcare and information science by demonstrating measurably the lifesaving energy of standardized scenario, which she and her group of 38 nurses had launched in an Istanbul hospital through the Crimean Warfare, decreasing loss of life charges within the ward by 99 p.c. To speak these revelatory outcomes to a public illiterate of statistics, she devised a brand new sort of pie chart, identified in the present day because the Nightingale rose diagram, which she despatched to Queen Victoria and which ushered in a brand new age of information visualization, empowering generations of knowledge designers and provoking W.E.B. Du Bois to create the epoch-making diagrams of African American life he offered on the World’s Truthful within the closing years of Nightingale’s life.
But it surely was greater than standardized sanitation she delivered to these hospital wards and greater than standardized sanitation that saved these human lives. Simply as revolutionary was the kind of affected person care that made these wounded troopers await “The Girl with the Lamp” as their “ministering angel” and prompted Emily Dickinson to have fun her as “holy” throughout the Atlantic.
Years earlier than Walt Whitman, whereas volunteering as a nurse within the American Civil Warfare, attested to how “personal love, caresses, and the magnetic flood of sympathy and friendship [do] more good than all the medicine in the world,” Nightingale got here to see compassion not as a flourish on medical care however as its most tonic providing and its major instrument of therapeutic. That her personal life spanned greater than double the life expectancy of her time and place is definitely not unrelated to her unusual perception into well being, epochs forward of her time in some ways — however most of all in her deep understanding of the dialogue between the physique and the thoughts, in well being and in therapeutic.
When Nightingale’s pioneering nursing college at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London grew so profitable that two new wards have been constructed, the very first thing she ordered for the grand opening have been vegetation and flowers, figuring out effectively that after “all of the royalties are gone,” these lush blooming beauties can be “the principle pleasure to the sufferers and nurses.”
Since her earliest days as a working nurse, a century and a half earlier than immunologist Esther Sternberg demonstrated the link between emotional balance and susceptibility to disease, Nightingale witnessed affected person after affected person obtain flowers “with rapture” — a brightening of spirit that very clearly uplifted their whole state of being, allaying their bodily struggling in measurable methods:
I shall always remember the rapture of fever sufferers over a bunch of bright-coloured flowers. I bear in mind (in my very own case) a nosegay of untamed flowers being despatched me, and from that second restoration turning into extra speedy.
She formalized these observations within the second version of her revolutionary ebook Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not, printed in 1860, of which this humble lady was so proud that she despatched a duplicate to Queen Victoria. In it, below the heading “Flowers,” Nightingale admonishes towards one of many commonest and gravest errors in healthcare:
The folly and ignorance which reign too typically supreme over the sickroom can’t be higher exemplified than by this: whereas the nurse will depart the affected person stewing in a corrupting environment, one of the best ingredient of which is carbonic acid [carbon dioxide], she’s going to deny him, on the plea of unhealthiness, a glass of reduce flowers or a rising plant. Now, nobody ever noticed “overcrowding” by vegetation in a room or ward. And the carbonic acid they offer off at nights wouldn’t poison a fly. Nay, in overcrowded rooms, they really take up carbonic acid and provides off oxygen. Reduce flowers additionally decompose water and produce oxygen gasoline. It’s true there are particular flowers, e.g., lilies, the scent of which is claimed to depress the nervous system. These are simply identified by the scent and could be prevented.
Lengthy earlier than neuroscience started intimating that consciousness is not a brain function but a full-body phenomenon, lengthy earlier than psychology and physiology entwined to light up how the body and the mind converge in the healing of trauma, Nightingale — whose very being was imprinted with a cherishment of flowers by the identify her dad and mom had given her — writes:
Individuals say the impact is simply on the thoughts. It’s no such factor. The impact is on the physique, too. Little as we find out about the best way by which we’re affected by kind, by color and lightweight, we do know this, that they’ve an precise bodily impact.
As soon as once more forward of her time, she extends especial compassion to sufferers affected by what we name psychological sickness, now classify alongside an more and more elaborate spectrum of issues, then crudely labeled as hysteria or melancholy or just (and punitively) madness — sufferers doubly anguished by their powerlessness to intercept their very own darkish spirals of thought, for which magnificence and lightweight present such sanative interception. Noting that the sick “endure to extra from psychological in addition to bodily ache,” Nightingale writes in her nursing guide:
Type, color, will free your affected person from his painful concepts higher than any argument.
Writing on the daybreak of self-help as we now comprehend it, when the pseudoscience of “optimistic pondering” was simply starting to intoxicate the fashionable thoughts because the snake oil of our time, Nightingale inverts the premise and, anticipating William James’s landmark theory of how our bodies affect our feelings by 1 / 4 century, writes:
Volumes are actually written and spoken upon the impact of the thoughts upon the physique. A lot of it’s true. However I want a bit extra was considered the impact of the physique on the thoughts. You who imagine yourselves overwhelmed with cares, however are ready each day to stroll up [the street], or out within the nation… you little know a lot your anxieties are thereby lightened; you little understand how intensified they grow to be to those that can haven’t any change, how the very partitions of their sickrooms appear hung with their cares, how the ghosts of their troubles hang-out their beds, how inconceivable it turns into for them to flee from some pursuing thought with out some assist from selection.
Devoting a complete part of the ebook to selection, Nightingale notes that longtime nurses and long-term sufferers share in figuring out simply how immensely “the nerves of the sick endure from seeing the identical partitions, the identical ceiling, the identical environment” throughout lengthy convalescence. She affords an antidote to the debilitating bodily results of monotony:
The superior cheerfulness of individuals struggling extreme paroxysms of ache over that of individuals affected by nervous debility has typically been remarked upon, and attributed to the enjoyment of the previous of their intervals of respite. I incline to assume that almost all of cheerful instances is to be discovered amongst these sufferers who aren’t confined to at least one room, no matter their struggling, and that almost all of depressed instances can be seen amongst these subjected to a protracted monotony of objects about them.
The nervous body actually suffers as a lot from this because the digestive organs from lengthy monotony of weight loss program, as, e.g., the soldier from his twenty-one years’ “boiled beef.”
She makes a particular case for the vivifying energy of coloration, insisting {that a} affected person’s longing for magnificence just isn’t a mere whim however each an indicator of their psychological inclination towards restoration and a really actual physiological want signaled by the physique alongside its trajectory of therapeutic:
The impact in illness of lovely objects, of number of objects, and particularly of brilliancy of color, is hardly in any respect appreciated. Such cravings are normally referred to as the “fancies” of sufferers. And infrequently likely sufferers have “fancies,” as, e.g., once they need two contradictions. However, rather more typically, their (so-called) “fancies” are essentially the most precious indications of what’s needed for his or her restoration. And it might be effectively if nurses would watch these (so-called) “fancies” carefully.
Half a century earlier than Goethe devised his theory of color and emotion, Nightingale notes the invigoration produced by heat, shiny colours and the wearying results of lengthy hours spent deep, cool shades as she affords her treatment for nervous prostration and burnout:
This state of nerves is most incessantly to be relieved by care in affording them a pleasing view, a considered selection as to flowers and fairly issues. (Nobody who has watched the sick can doubt the actual fact, that some really feel stimulus from scarlet flowers, exhaustion from deep blue, and so on.) Gentle by itself will typically relieve it. The longing for “the return of the day,” which the sick so continually evince, is mostly nothing however the need for gentle, the remembrance of the reduction which quite a lot of objects earlier than the attention affords to the harassed sick thoughts.
She continued elaborating on and advocating for these concepts for the rest of her lengthy life. In 1892, already one in every of England’s most distinguished public figures, Nightingale was requested to contribute the entry on nursing for one of many period’s hottest encyclopedic dictionaries. Beneath the heading “NURSES, coaching of,” after detailing numerous necessities of the expert healthcare practitioner starting from hygiene to decorate, she writes:
Second solely to air is gentle as an important for progress, well being and restoration from illness — not solely daylight, however daylight — and certainly
contemporary air have to be sun-warmed, sun-penetrated air. This needs to be meant to incorporate color, nice and fairly sights for the affected person’s eyes to relaxation on — number of objects, flowers, photos. Individuals say the impact is on the thoughts. So it’s, however the enlightened doctor tells us it’s on the physique too. The solar is a sculptor in addition to a painter. The Greeks have been proper as to their Apollo.
However my favourite of her reflections on the therapeutic energy of nature comes from a letter she penned shortly after her eightieth birthday, within the first 12 months of the 20th century, synthesizing her learnings about nursing and life. (What’s it about eighty being the age at which great minds distill their life-advice?) Winkingly addressing the nursing workers at St. Thomas’ Hospital as her “expensive kids,” for that they had affectionately referred to as her their “mother-chief” all through her lengthy service, Nightingale writes:
There have been nice, I’ll say, discoveries in nursing. A really exceptional physician, an incredible buddy of mine, now lifeless, launched new concepts about consumption, which could then be referred to as the curse of England. His personal spouse was what is known as “consumptive,” i.e., she had tubercular illness in her lungs. He stated to her: “now you need to select: both you will need to spend the following six months in your room. Or you will need to backyard each day” (that they had a wretched little backyard on the finish of a avenue) “you will need to dig — get your ft moist each day.” She selected the latter, grew to become the hardiest of girls and lived to be previous.
Complement with two centuries of nice writers and artists on the creative and spiritual rewards of gardening, Ellen Meloy on the conscience of color, and V (previously Eve Ensler) on how the tree outside her hospital window saved her life, then revisit this spacetime serenade to flowers and the meaning of life, starring Emily Dickinson, Michael Pollan, and The Little Prince.
