Did Florence Nightingale suffer from Bipolar Disorder?

Main Category: Bipolar
Article Date: 18 Apr 2004 - 0:00 PDT

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Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing who said God called her to her work, "heard voices" and suffered from a bipolar disorder, a University of Pittsburgh mental health expert said Friday.

Nightingale was 31 when she asked God in a letter why she couldn't be happy: "Why, oh my God, can I not be satisfied with the life that satisfies so many people and told that the conversation of all of these clever men ought to be enough for me? Why am I starving, desperate and diseased on it?"

Dr. Kathy Wisner, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, cited the note as evidence that Nightingale suffered from a bipolar disorder that caused long periods of depression and remarkable bursts of productivity.

Nightingale was the subject of a conference Friday at the University of Maryland School of Medicine that discussed Wisner's theory. The annual conference has diagnosed the ills of historic figures since 1995.

"Florence heard voices and experienced a number of severe depressive episodes in her teens and early 20s - symptoms consistent with the onset of bipolar disorder," Wisner said.

She cited the diary and letters that Nightingale wrote throughout her life as evidence. She said some of the writings also reveal the other side of the illness.

"This is the life," Nightingale wrote in 1851, around the same time she wrote the first letter cited by Wisner. "Now I know what it's like to live and love life, and I will be really sorry to leave life. I wish for no other earth, no other world but this."

Nightingale gained her reputation as a tireless nurse during the Crimean War. She was appointed to oversee the introduction of female nurses into the military hospitals in Turkey in 1854. Once there, she found unsanitary conditions in British army hospitals and worked to improve hygiene and nutrition for sick soldiers.

When she returned to Britain, Nightingale was hailed as a national heroine, and she raised the nursing profession to a respectable profession for women.

But even before her return, she fell ill, suffering from extreme fever and fatigue, according to a case study conducted for the conference. For most of the next 40 years, Nightingale complained of spinal pain, insomnia, anorexia, nervousness and depression.

Her symptoms often have been attributed to chronic brucellosis.

"She may very well have contracted the infection in the Crimean War," Wisner said. "But that illness alone does not account for her severe mood swings, or the fact that she could be so incredibly productive and so sick at the same time."

Wisner also said the effects of bipolar disorders tend to ease when people reach their 60s. When Nightingale reached the age of 68, her symptoms lessened.

Dr. Lesley Hall, an archivist and historian at the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine in London, described the diagnosis as an interesting theory but said no one knows for sure.

"I think retrospectively diagnosing distinguished Victorian invalids is a positive parlor game," Hall said.

From:
http://www.timesleader.com/mld/timesleader/5773355.htm

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