Lamp of Florence Nightingale
A lamp is the emblem of nursing, after Florence Nightingale, the “Lady with the Lamp”, who made night rounds of the wards of the army hospital at Scutari during the Crimean War. The lamp she carried there was a lantern, not the oil lamp of many pictures.
Meaning
Nightingale was superintendent of the female nurses in the military hospitals in the East, and arrived with her nurses at Constantinople on 3 November 1854, the National Army Museum records. The Times reported that at night she walked among the beds with a light in her hand. Her biographer Sir Edward Cook (1913) quotes the passage, by Mr Macdonald of the Times Fund, which he says became famous “by adaptation, throughout the world”: “she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.” Nurses and nursing schools carry the lamp today: the University of Alberta, which held Canada’s first Lighting of the Lamp ceremony in 2017, calls it an international symbol of nursing.
Origin and history
The image spread fast. The Wellcome Collection holds a coloured mezzotint of about 1855, by Tomkins after Butterworth, of Nightingale with her candle on the night round of the wards at Scutari, its lettering quoting the Times letter of February 1855. Cook records that rhymed broadsheets with rough woodcuts of the Lady with the Lamp were printed in Seven Dials and Soho. In November 1855 Sidney Herbert read out a soldier’s letter at a public meeting: “we could kiss her shadow as it fell”. Longfellow, in the following year as Cook puts it (the National Army Museum dates the poem to 1857), made it all into “Santa Filomena”: “Lo! in that house of misery / A lady with a lamp I see / Pass through the glimmering gloom, / And flit from room to room.” His sufferer turns to kiss her shadow on the wall, and the poem ends that “A Lady with a Lamp shall stand / In the great history of the land”. The National Army Museum calls Longfellow one of the main creators of the Nightingale cult.
Which lamp did she carry?
A lantern, by the accounts that describe it. Cook notes that “the lamp of famous memory was a camp lamp”, and that Mrs Bracebridge, who went out with her, took possession of it. The Islington Education Library Service keeps a Turkish lantern in its handling collection of the same design as the lamps Nightingale used in the Crimea: two copper bowls with white linen stretched between them on thin wires, folding and unfolding like an accordion around a candle. It notes that illustrations of the “lady with the lamp” often show a different lamp. The National Army Museum shows a lamp of hers, dated about 1856. Our drawing is the lamp of the pictures, as nursing emblems draw it.
The lamp in nursing today
At the University of Alberta’s first Lighting of the Lamp ceremony in 2017, 350 first-year nursing students raised lanterns and recited a modern version of the Nightingale Pledge. The faculty describes the lamp as a symbol of the lit lamp Nightingale used while caring for injured soldiers in the Crimean War.
Read next
- Next in Symbols of medicineShow globeA show globe is a glass vessel filled with coloured liquid that stood in a pharmacist’s window as the sign of the trade. Laws in New Hampshire and Washington still forbid shops without a licensed pharmacist from displaying one.
- The same shape in The language of flowersHyacinthFor Charlotte de La Tour and the English books that followed her, the hyacinth meant "game" or "play", after the Greek myth of Hyacinthus, killed by a thrown discus. American books made the blue hyacinth "constancy" instead.
See also
Rod of Asclepius, Caduceus, Bowl of Hygieia, Red cross, Red Lion and Sun.
Sources
- Florence Nightingale: The Lady with the Lamp, Explore: Health and Medicine, National Army Museum, Arrival at Scutari; The Lady with the Lamp
- The Life of Florence Nightingale, vol. 1, Sir Edward Tyas Cook (Macmillan, 1913), Project Gutenberg, Part III, chapter 3; Part III, chapter 7
- Santa Filomena, in The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Santa Filomena” (1857), Project Gutenberg, Santa Filomena
- Coloured mezzotint: Florence Nightingale, C. A. Tomkins after J. Butterworth, c. 1855, Wellcome Collection, Description; lettering
- Concertina Lantern, Turkey, Object Lessons: Houses and Homes, World, Islington Education Library Service, Object description
- UAlberta Faculty of Nursing takes up torch of long-standing tradition, Michael Brown, 13 September 2017, University of Alberta, Faculty of Nursing, News story
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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