The people who hold children at their most vulnerable

Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820. She is remembered primarily for two things: the lamp, and the statistics.

The lamp is the image — the 'Lady with the Lamp,' moving through hospital wards at night. What the image obscures is the reason she was checking: not sentiment, but data. Nightingale was one of the most rigorous statisticians of her century. She created infographics — she literally invented the polar area diagram — to demonstrate that more soldiers in the Crimean War were dying of preventable infections acquired in hospitals than of battle wounds. Her argument: what you attend to changes what you see, and what you see changes what is possible.

I spent three days attending to my daughter in a hospital ward, which meant attending to the nurses who attended to her. I watched them in a way I had never watched anyone at work — with the full attention of a parent who has temporarily surrendered what she cares most about into someone else's hands.

What I noticed: they attended to everything. Not just the clinical indicators. They attended to the child. To whether she was frightened. To what she wanted to watch on the screen above her bed, because a child who is distracted heals differently than one who is frightened and still.