Nurse's Companion Cat
Bismarck
c. 1860s–1870s
One of the many beloved cats of nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale, who shared her rooms and even her writing desk with a succession of pampered felines.
- Owner
- Florence Nightingale
- Years
- c. 1860s–1870s
- Known for
- Nurse's Companion Cat
Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, was a devoted cat lover who is said to have owned around sixty cats over the course of her long life, often keeping several at once. Bismarck was one of them — among a line of cats she frequently named after the prominent public figures of the day, so that her rooms were shared at various times by cats called Bismarck, Gladstone and Disraeli.
Nightingale, who spent much of her later life bedridden and working from home on the reforms that transformed hospitals and nursing, found real companionship in her cats. She let them roam freely through her rooms, wrote fondly about their characters in her letters, and was known to complain good-naturedly about paw-prints left across her papers as the cats wandered over the desk while she worked. She reportedly considered cats to possess more sympathy and feeling than most people gave them credit for.
Bismarck and his fellow cats are a small, human footnote to the story of a formidable reformer — a reminder that the woman remembered for her iron will and statistical rigour also filled her home with cats and cared for them tenderly. For cat lovers, Nightingale stands as one of history's great feline devotees.