Third in a Series of Seven Blogs about Drama in Nursing
Nurse Stereotypes in Movies
Angel – The White Angel
The nurse as angel of mercy has a religious origin stemming from the self-sacrificing Roman Catholic nuns who worked as nurses among the sick poor. The angel stereotype was popularized in the sugarcoated image of a secular saint derived from Florence Nightingale as the angel of the Crimea. Longfellow’s poem ‘Santa Filomena’ and the ubiquitous paintings of Nightingale as the Lady with the Lamp casting a halo-like ethereal glow around her face reinforce the angel of mercy stereotype. In their exploration of popular images of nurses and nursing, Philip Darbyshire and Suzanne Gordon note:
Florence Nightingale has become easily identified as the soul or spirit of nursing and as the embodiment of the selfless, devoted, compassionate care that borders on the saintly. In some cases, Nightingale’s very name has come to symbolize the precise opposite of what she actually was, and is used to suggest that a person is a naïve, do-gooder. Thus people may say to you, if they believe you are misguidedly altruistic, “Oh don’t be such a Florence Nightingale.” 1
Darbyshire and Gordon warn that “buying into the ‘angel’ stereotype may be a Faustian bargain, for there is a price to pay. ‘Angels’ may be saintly, but such perfection is impossible for mere mortal nurses to achieve or maintain … angels do not require any education or experience. … Real nurses are educated, not born, and the path to becoming skilled and competent is a long and hard one that requires not divine, but human intervention.” 2
The trailer to the 1936 film The White Angel capitalizes on the angel of mercy stereotype when it announces: “Proudly WARNER BROS. PRESENT KAY FRANCIS As The Immortal FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE” (italics original). The wording hints at a fault that Frank Nugent, film critic for the New York Times, who found the film “worshipful” and “pompous,” identified. In reciting her lines, Kay Francis “is speaking for posterity,” that is, from a twentieth-century perspective, and directly to the camera. 3 After reading a report that her father has brought home on the horrendous condition of London hospitals, Nightingale declares to her family, “I suddenly knew that I was giving my life to humanity. … I’m going to be a nurse. … I want to be a nurse more than anything else in the world.” Later, Dr West, head of London hospitals, rebuffs Nightingale when on her return from Kaiserwerth, diploma in hand, she asks for work as a hospital nurse. To his suggestion that she marry and do home nursing instead, Nightingale looks heavenward, declaring, “It will take more than a Dr. West to stop me.” In the final scene, when awaiting an audience with the Queen, Nightingale rehearses what she will say, ending with another nod to history and to the camera. Proclaiming nursing as woman’s highest vocation, she states that she wants to establish schools for all those women coming out in the future, “willing to take my vow: I solemnly pledge …” and recites The Nightingale Pledge. 4
The scene most effectively capturing the angel of mercy shows Nightingale’s nightly rounds through the wards in the Scutari hospital. Soldiers who have come to say goodbye to Nightingale before they leave for the front are told, “She never can sleep until she can assure herself that each one of her patients has received proper care. … Four miles of beds, night after night.” 5 The ethereal glow of her lantern and the lush operatic-sounding music accompanying her casts a religious aura over the work of this saintly nurse who is keeping watch over the sick and wounded soldiers of the British army by night. Voice-over recitation of Longfellow’s ”Santa Filomena” during Nightingale’s rounds reinforces the angel of mercy image.
The screenplay allegedly was adapted from Lytton Strachey’s chapter about Nightingale in Eminent Victorians, in which she is depicted not as an angel but rather as demon-possessed. 6 Nursing leaders, however, endorsed the film for its perceived emphasis on the need for nursing reform, a need highlighted by the film’s opening depiction of the disgraceful behavior of London’s hospital nurses. Directors of the American Nurses Association praised The White Angel for dramatizing “The importance of selecting young women of education, character, and courage for nursing” and “The necessity for providing for them a sound education in nursing in accordance with the needs of the time.” 7 The reviewer for Public Health Nursing was impressed with the portrayal of the lead character and was “very glad to see Florence Nightingale presented as a vital and forceful personality. There is nothing wishy-washy about her; she is a fighter.” 8 These nurses were willing to overlook the liberties taken with historical facts in light of the more important message conveyed about Nightingale’s work. 9
Nurse as handmaiden is the topic of the next Blog.
To learn how the history of nursing was reflected on the opera stage, see Judith Barger, The Nurse in History and Opera: From Servant to Sister (Lexington Books, 2024).
Notes
1. Philip Darbyshire and Suzanne Gordon. “Exploring Popular Images and Representations of Nurses and Nursing,” in Professional Nursing: Concepts, Issues, and Challenges, ed. John Daley, Sandra Speedy, Deborah Jackson, Vickie Lambert, and Clinton Lambert (New York: Springer, 2005), 75. See also Phillip Darbyshire, “Heroines, Hookers and Harridans: Exploring Popular Images and Representations of Nurses and Nursing,” in Contexts of Nursing: An Introduction, 4th, ed. John Daly, Sandra Speedy and Debra Jackson (Chatswood, New South Wales: Elsevier Australia, 2014), 57.
2. Darbyshire and Gordon, “Exploring Popular Images,” 76; Darbyshire, “Heroines, Hookers and Harridans,” 57.
3. Frank S. Nugent, “The Screen: A Worshipful Biography of Florence Nightingale is ‘The White Angel’,” at the Strand’, New York Times, 25 June 1936, 24
4. The White Angel [1936], directed by William Dieterle, produced by Henry Blanke, Screenplay by [Michael Jacoby and] Mordaunt Shairp (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video DVD, 2015). The Nightingale Pledge, a modified version of the Hippocratic Oath, did not exist at that time, nor did Nightingale write it.
5. The White Angel, spoken by Sister Colomba (Colombo in credits).
6. Giles Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929).
7. “The Florence Nightingale Foundation.” AJN 36 (8) (Aug 1936): 797.
8. Mumford, Eleanor W. “The White Angel.” Public Health Nursing 28 (August 1936): 540
9. For instance, that Nightingale did not earn a diploma at Kaiserwerth, and that the Nightingale Pledge that she recited was not her own; Lystra Gretter and a Committee for the Farrand Training School Grace for Nurses in Detroit, Michigan, created the Pledge in honor of Nightingale in 1893.
