Her parents are less enthusiastic.

They are absolutely horrified.

Nursing at the time is not a profession as we know it today.

It has actually a very bad reputation.

In sort of popular media, there is the Charles Dickens character Mrs. Gamp, who is a nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit, and she is often drunk.

She doesn't care for her patients in any way.

She doesn't really care about nursing at all, and this caricature of nurses becomes sort of the main image of nursing within the sort of population of Britain.

It is a gushing paean to Nightingale the nurse, whom he describes as "a noble type of good, heroic womanhood." But the poetic gloss of her public reputation obscures the woman beneath it and the reality of her contribution to the world.