User Reviews

Invoking Florence Nightingale in this story line is certainly due to her being well known as the preeminent pioneer of modern nursing. That includes the founding of the school of modern nursing at St. Thomas hospital in London in 1860. This story is built around that theme.

The references to women with loose morals practicing applied nursing no doubt comes from the life stories of Julia Bulette of Virginia City Nevada and Rosa May of Bodie California of that era. And there were probably 100s if not 1000s of others. They were loved and hated in their own communities. This explains the use prejudice in the story against "Kitty Albright" by the women in the wagon train.

I could not understand for the life of me why Florence Nightingale was referenced in this story and not Clara Barton. Her service during the Civil War was rather well known also and the passengers of the Wagon Train would have heard of the woman called 'the angel of the battlefield'.

Robert Horton picks up Polly Bergen who was stranded after her stagecoach was attacked and all killed saved her. She's a woman back from Europe where she studied under Florence Nightingale and is now a nurse much to the consternation of her parents Howard Wendell and Eleanor Audley.

But she has also learned from the sanitary practices of Louis Pasteur and her idea is to use the Wagon Train as an experimental lab of sorts. In addition to preaching sanitation to the pilgrims, Bergen also creates a hospital wagon.

She has need of it when Kathleen Freeman and Morgan Woodward's kids all come down with scarlet fever. This is where Bergen is truly tested.

Knowing how well known Barton was in post Civil War USA I could not understand the references to Florence Nightingale nor the opposition of the Wagon Train women to her who think that nursing is for fallen women somehow. Clara Barton was anything but that.

How could the show's writers and producer miss this?