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Nightingale, Florence - Intimations of her destiny
Identifier
011943
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Florence Nightingale – Mystic, Visionary, Healer – Barbara Montgomery Dossey
When Florence Nightingale was 6 years old, she was sick throughout the year with whooping cough, colds, and other related illnesses. Yet she remembered it as the happiest time of her life. For her, the days and weeks of illness and infirmity were times of heightened peace and quiet, which she always craved. In the serenity of the sick room, away from the bustling of family and servants and the constant stream of visitors to her family’s country home, she had a deeper sense of the spiritual world that she was drawn to at an early age.
“….the first idea I can recollect when I was a child was a desire to nurse the sick. My day dreams were all of hospitals and I visited them whenever I could. I never communicated it to anyone, it would have been laughed at; but I thought God had called me to serve Him in that way”.
Florence Nightingale, Curriculum Vitae, 1851