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50 free Florence Nightingale trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Florence Nightingale trivia quiz covers the woman named after the Italian city of her birth who defied her wealthy family to become a nurse. It follows the call from God at sixteen, the pet owl from Athens, the training at Kaiserswerth, the 38 nurses who sailed to Scutari in 1854, the lamp and the hammer, the sanitary campaigns and coxcomb diagrams that came after, the nursing school at St Thomas', the decades spent bedridden but phenomenally productive, and the honours, banknotes, hospitals and asteroid that carry her name. The easy questions are ones most people know: her nickname, her war, her profession. The medium ones ask about her family, her training, Scutari, her books and her statistics. The hard ones dig into Sidney Herbert, Mary Seacole, the Renkioi hospital, Cassandra, the 1890 phonograph recording, the Order of Merit and the rare photographs. It suits a nursing-school icebreaker, a Victorian history round or International Nurses Day. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01By what nickname did Florence Nightingale become an icon of Victorian culture?
The Lady with the Lamp
It came from a Times report describing her solitary night rounds with a little lamp.
Q 02During which war did Nightingale come to prominence?
The Crimean War
Britain and France had entered the war against Russia on the side of the Ottoman Empire.
Q 03Nightingale was named after her birthplace. Where was she born?
Florence, Italy
Her older sister Parthenope was named after the Greek settlement on the site of Naples.
Q 04What was Nightingale's father's surname at birth, before he inherited an estate?
Shore
William Edward Shore took the Nightingale name on inheriting the Lea estate from Peter Nightingale.
Q 05Which of these subjects did Nightingale's father include in his daughters' unusually advanced curriculum?
Mathematics
He also taught them French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek and constitutional history.
Q 06How old was Nightingale when she experienced what she called her first call from God to service?
Sixteen
It happened on 7 February 1837, though the call did not say what form the service should take.
Q 07Which politician and poet courted Nightingale for nine years before she turned him down?
Richard Monckton Milnes
She was convinced marriage would interfere with her calling to nursing.
Q 08Which politician, met on his 1847 honeymoon, became her lifelong friend and sent her to the Crimea?
Sidney Herbert
As Secretary of War he authorised her mission; some accused her of hastening his death in 1861 by overworking him.
Q 09What kind of pet did Nightingale rescue from tormenting children in Athens and carry in her pocket?
A little owl
She named it Athena; it died shortly before she left for the Crimea.
Q 10At which German religious community did Nightingale receive four months of medical training in 1850-51?
Kaiserswerth
Her anonymous report on the institution was her first published work.
Q 11What was Nightingale's job from August 1853 until she left for the war?
Superintendent of the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen
Her father gave her an income of £500 a year, letting her pursue a career.
Q 12How many women volunteer nurses accompanied Nightingale to the Ottoman Empire in October 1854?
38
They included her aunt Mai Smith and head nurse Eliza Roberts, plus 15 Catholic nuns.
Q 13Where was the military hospital in which Nightingale worked during the war?
Scutari, opposite Constantinople
Q 21How much money did the Nightingale Fund raise for her to set up the nursing school?
£45,000
The fund was established at a public meeting in the Crimea in November 1855.
Q 22What was the title of Nightingale's 1859 book that became the cornerstone of training for her profession?
Notes on Nursing
It was written for people nursing at home, but sold well to the general public.
Q 23Where did the first trained Nightingale nurses begin work in May 1865?
Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary
Introducing trained nurses into the workhouse system meant sick paupers were no longer nursed by other paupers.
It was in the Selimiye Barracks, about 295 nautical miles from the main British camp at Balaklava.
Q 14Which engineer was commissioned to design a prefabricated hospital after Nightingale's plea to The Times?
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Renkioi Hospital had a death rate less than a tenth of Scutari's.
Q 15How many British soldiers died at Scutari during Nightingale's first winter there?
4,077
Ten times more died of typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than of wounds.
Q 16What did the government's Sanitary Commission do at Scutari in March 1855 that sharply cut death rates?
Flushed the sewers and improved ventilation
Nightingale never claimed credit for the fall in deaths herself.
Q 17Which nurse and hotel-keeper in the Crimea reportedly had a frosty relationship with Nightingale?
Mary Seacole
Seacole's own memoir records only one friendly meeting, when Nightingale gave her a bed for the night.
Q 18What nickname did troops give Nightingale after she broke into locked storerooms for medicine?
The lady with the hammer
The Times correspondent thought it unladylike and popularised the lamp version instead.
Q 19Which American poet's 1857 poem 'Santa Filomena' helped popularise her famous nickname?
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The phrase originated in a report in The Times.
Q 20Where in London did Nightingale open the world's first secular nursing school in 1860?
St Thomas' Hospital
It is now the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery at King's College London.
Q 24Which gin-drinking Dickens nurse was said to be only a mild exaggeration of nursing before Nightingale?
Sarah Gamp
She appears in Martin Chuzzlewit as incompetent, negligent, alcoholic and corrupt.
Q 25Which American, mentored by Nightingale in the 1870s, is called 'America's first trained nurse'?
Linda Richards
Richards went on to found nursing schools in the US and Japan.
Q 26In 1907 Nightingale became the first woman to receive which honour?
The Order of Merit
She had been the first recipient of the Royal Red Cross in 1883.
Q 27What type of chart is Nightingale famous for using to show causes of mortality among soldiers?
The polar area diagram, or 'rose diagram'
She called a compilation of them a 'coxcomb' and used them to persuade MPs who would not read statistical tables.
Q 28Of which learned body did Nightingale become the first female member in 1859?
The Royal Statistical Society
She became an honorary member of the American Statistical Association in 1874.
Q 29To what did British soldier mortality in India fall per 1,000 after ten years of Nightingale's reforms?
18, from 69
She lobbied for a Royal Commission in 1858-59 and studied sanitation in rural life there.
Q 30What is the title of Nightingale's best-known feminist essay, protesting the 'over-feminisation' of women?
Cassandra
Elaine Showalter called it 'a link between Wollstonecraft and Woolf'.