“I have done my own duty": la fatiga de la compasión en Florence Nightingale

Awarded a doctorate in 2006 from the Alexandre Koyré Centre and the Autonomous University of Madrid, Dolores Martín Moruno published her thesis under the title of Electric and Magnetic Dreams in Romantic Europe: The debate about the representation of Nature in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries (Paris, Blanchard, 2014). Specialising in history and the philosophy of science, since 2011 she has been teaching the history of medicine and the history of the emotions at the University of Geneva.

Summary. Florence Nightingale is, without any doubt, the most famous figure in the history of nursing. Better known as “the lady with the lamp” owing to the night rounds she used to make to keep an eye on the state of health of convalescent soldiers during the Crimean War (1853-1856), her personality embodies the importance of compassion – as a reaction to the suffering of others which is always transformed into actions taken to alleviate that suffering – as the keystone of the practice of nursing. She helped to reinforce her own image as the compassionate mother of the soldiers in the hospital at Scutari when she wrote, in one of her letters from the Crimea, that she was only doing her duty to fight against the suffering and hardship that war produced. This heroic image of Nightingale contrasts, however, with another more vulnerable side, in that she suffered from what we would today call chronic fatigue or compassion fatigue. This affliction, which particularly affects humanitarian workers, is directly related to the fact that she was constantly exposed to the suffering of others, as well as the obstacles they encountered in trying to alleviate this suffering owing to the difficult terrain. In light of the correspondence that Nightingale produced during the war in Crimea, this talk will examine the vulnerability of humanitarian agents when they become the collateral victims of armed conflict.

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