Florence Nightingale Museum Florence Nightingale Museum The Florence Nightingale Museum is located at St Thomas' Hospital, which faces the Palace of Westminster across the River Thames in South Bank, central London, England. It is open to the public seven days a week. It re-opened on 12 May 2010 following an extensive £1.4m refurbishment. The museum tells the real story of Florence Nightingale, "the lady with the lamp", from her Victorian childhood to her experiences in the Crimean, through to her years as an ardent campaigner for health reform. Nightingale is recognised as the founder of modern nursing in the United Kingdom. The new
Florence Nightingale writing, including her extensive work on religion and mysticism, has only been published posthumously. Florence Nightingale was born on 12 May 1820 into a rich, upper-class, well-connected British family at the "Villa Colombaia", in Florence, Tuscany, Italy, and was named after the city of her birth. Florence's older sister Frances Parthenope had similarly been named after her place of birth, "Parthenope", a Greek settlement now part of the city of Naples. The family moved back to England in 1821, with Nightingale being brought up in the family's homes at Embley, Hampshire and Lea Hurst, Derbyshire. Florence inherited a liberal-humanitarian outlook