Right across from Palaceside Building lie the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace. In the rose garden there, "Florence Nightingale" was still in bloom—a rose with a gentle, soft pink tone.
We featured it at its peak here last May, but these two saplings were commemorative plantings of seedlings presented to the Empress in September 2009 by the International Council of Nurses (Geneva) and the Japanese Nursing Association. Developed at the request of the ICN for the 75th anniversary of the Florence Nightingale International Foundation, its sister body, "Florence Nightingale" is a new variety with cream-colored flowers that bloom nearly year-round, evoking both gentleness and strength.
Famous as the "Lady with the Lamp," Nightingale (May 12, 1820–August 13, 1910) was a British nurse, social entrepreneur, statistician, and nursing educator. Renowned for her devotion to wounded soldiers in the Crimean War and for data-driven public-health reform—the mother of modern nursing education—she also displayed extraordinary talent in hospital architecture.
As a "hospital architect," Nightingale deeply deplored how overcrowding of patients, errors in hospital management, and flaws in building design themsel
ves worsened conditions, and even triggered nosocomial infections that raised mortality.
After returning from the Crimean War, she turned her attention not only to army and navy hospitals but to private ones as well, making numerous proposals on how hospitals should be built. Summarized in Notes on Hospitals, she wrote that "the very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm." In 1871, a ward meeting her conditions was built at St Thomas's Hospital in London under her guidance—a design that remains a model Nightingale ward in history.
Large hospitals have seen many architectural improvements. Small hospitals (bedded clinics), however, can lead to disaster with one mistake, as in the orthopedic fire in Fukuoka that claimed many lives. Fire-door inspections falling through gaps between the Building Standards Act and fire codes must never happen again.