Florence Nightingale Museum

Address: | St Thomas’s Hospital, 2 Lambeth Palace Road, SE1 7EW |
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Phone: | 020-7620 0374 |
Website: | |
Opening times: | Mon–Sun 10:00–17:00 |
How to get there: | Tube: Waterloo and Westminster |
Entry fee: | Admission charge |
Additional information: | Shop |
Hidden away beneath the modern blocks of St Thomas’s Hospital, this small museum describes the life and work of Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) and preserves a memorial collection of ‘Nightingalia’, formerly the pride of the Matrons of St Thomas’s. The museum opened here in 1989, on the site of the pioneering nursing school that Nightingale founded in 1860. As the ‘lady with the lamp’ who cared for the sick and wounded in the Crimea (1854–56), she became a reluctant legend in her own lifetime. The marble bust which heads the display was one of the very few portraits of herself that she ever allowed to be taken from life, and then only because it had been commissioned by the soldiers who had been her patients. Nightingale’s careful control of her own image also played an important role in securing the political influence that would enable her to contribute to a complete transformation in the status of nursing, eventually providing many women with a new means of achieving economic independence. |
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MUSEUMS & GALLERIES OF LONDON
Details below are taken from our Blue Guide Museums and Galleries of London. This is a 2005 title, here generally updated for website address and opening times, with useful comments from some of the museums themselves. More recent information is given in Emily Barber's magisterial new Blue Guide London, "Exceptional update to a classic and useful guide to this amazing city" (Amazon reader review).
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