The Voice Before the Lantern

On February 7, 1837, a seventeen-year-old Florence Nightingale sat in the garden at Embley Park and recorded four words in her diary: "God spoke to me." She had not yet entered a single hospital ward. She had never held a dying soldier's hand or carried a lantern through the corridors of Scutari. She was simply a young woman from a wealthy Hampshire family, and yet the voice of the Almighty came to her — not after her famous work, but before any of it had begun.…