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As we furiously wash our hands to maintain health and hygiene amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, we can thank Florence Nightingale for her work as one of the first advocates of hygiene in medicine. Through her work nursing and collecting data during the Crimean War, she laid the groundwork for standards of practice that put compassion, humanity, and cleanliness into the healing process.

As a young lady, Nightingale had a spiritual awakening that she was destined to serve the world instead of simply being a member of the elite. After studying in Germany and working in London, she heard about the deplorable conditions wounded soldiers were being subjected to during the Crimean War. Instead of furthering her career in London, Nightingale led a team of 38 nurses in the Barrack Hospital outside of Constantinople to improve nursing conditions for the sick and wounded soldiers.

After arriving in 1854, she noticed that more soldiers died of disease rather than battle wounds and suspected the unhygienic quarters, poor nutrition, stale air, and darkness as contributing factors to the soldiers’ dismal health. She called for the Sanitary Commission to flush sewage and improve the hygienic standards of the hospital. She also had the audacity to advocate for hand washing practices (which, unfortunately, did not become standard until the late 1800s and early 1900s). During her nightly rounds, she often visited soldiers and became known as “The Lady with the Lamp,” as she is most famously depicted.

These changes severely reduced the death rate among wounded soldiers and eventually proved to reduce death rates during peacetime as well. She brought back tons of data on how sanitation improved the odds of survival using pie charts and other graphics — which was actually rare at the time — and even developed her own kind of diagram. For her efforts as a pioneer in statistics, she was the first woman inducted into the Royal Statistical Society in 1859.

After her return, she grew ill with a bacterial infection she most likely contracted in Crimea and was bedridden for the rest of her life at age 38. From her sickbed, Nightingale wrote Notes on Nursing published in 1860, which detailed her proven methods for improving the conditions of the sick — directed specifically at mothers and other caretakers. The book is still a standard text for nursing schools.

Because of her contributions to the war effort and beyond, Queen Victoria granted her £45,000 for the Nightingale Fund, with which she set up the Nightingale Training School in July 1860. It is now part of King’s College in London and known as the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery.

With her school, written works, and mounds of data, she solidified nursing as a career path for women during a time when medicine was become predominantly male (and during a time when there were few opportunities for women to make a living to begin with). Most importantly, her intuitive contributions on the importance of cleanliness saved many lives before germ theory became widely accepted in the 20th century.

Today, a temporary hospital has been set up in London called NHS Nightingale Hospital in the ExCel Centre in East London as a response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Need tips on caretaking? Here are some of my favorite excerpts from Notes on Nursing:

VENTILATION + WARMING

The very first canon of nursing, the first and the last thing upon which a nurse’s attention must be fixed, the first essential to a patient, without which all the rest you can do for him is as nothing, with which I had almost said you may leave all the rest alone, is this: TO KEEP THE AIR HE BREATHES AS PURE AS THE EXTERNAL AIR, WITHOUT CHILLING HIM.

Air from the outside. Open your windows, shut your doors.

Always air your room, then, from the outside air, if possible. Windows are made to open; doors are made to shut—a truth which seems extremely difficult of apprehension. (The sass of this sentence is EVERYTHING.)

HEALTH OF HOUSES

There are five essential points in securing the health of houses:
1. Pure air. 2. Pure water. 3. Efficient drainage. 4. Cleanliness. 5. Light.

Without these, no house can be healthy. And it will be unhealthy just in proportion as they are deficient.

On Cleanliness:
Without cleanliness, within and without your house, ventilation is comparatively useless.

On Darkness:
A dark house is always an unhealthy house, always an ill-aired house, always a dirty house. Want of light stops growth, and promotes scrofula, rickets, &c., among the children…. People lose their health in a dark house, and if they get ill they cannot get well again in it.

[Sidenote: Without sunlight, we degenerate body and mind.]
(It seems obvious that sunlight is essential for health and yet it was often neglected. We know know that UV light even has antimicrobial effects in concentration. I love how she emphasizes this because apparently sick people would just be left in closed dark places which seems insane now.)

My personal favorite and one of the more important things to keep in mind when talking to anyone who isn’t well:

CHATTERING HOPES AND ADVICES.

The fact is, that the patient[1] is not “cheered” at all by these well-meaning, most tiresome friends. On the contrary, he is depressed and wearied. If, on the one hand, he exerts himself to tell each successive member of this too numerous conspiracy, whose name is legion, why he does not think as they do,—in what respect he is worse,—what symptoms exist that they know nothing of,—he is fatigued instead of “cheered,” and his attention is fixed upon himself. In general, patients who are really ill, do not want to talk about themselves. Hypochondriacs do, but again I say we are not on the subject of hypochondriacs.

About the author.
Alessandra is the mentor, educator, and writer behind Boneseed, a private practice devoted to deep self-inquiry through a range of physical, energetic, and mental modalities. She has over 500 hours of yoga, mentorship, and facilitation training and can be found slinging knowledge on her website, newsletter, and @bone.seed.

When Madame Marie Curie first arrived in the United States in May 1921, she had already discovered the elements polonium and radium, coined the term “radioactive,” and won the Nobel Prize. Twice. She was a woman triumphing in science, in what was then a man’s world.

Born Maria Salomea Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland (1867-1934), the youngest of five children, to two poor school teachers — Marie Curie became one of the most significant scientists of all time in a Victorian-era where academic opportunities for women were scarce. While many of her achievements have been lauded, not all her ingenious inventions are as well known. And one of this iconic researcher’s achievements is central to today’s fight against COVID-19.

In 1903, Marie Curie won the Nobel prize in Physics with her husband, Pierre Curie, and the physicist Henri Becquerel, for their work on radioactivity — she was the first woman ever to receive that honor. Curie later carried out the first research into treating cancer with radiation and founded the Curie Institutes, which are important medical research centers to this day.

In a tremendous nod to the number two — the second Nobel Prize she won in 1911 was even more epic: with that win in chemistry, Curie became the first person to receive the Nobel Prize twice. And to this day, she remains the only person to ever win Nobel Prizes for work in two different branches of science. The second Nobel Prize that Marie Curie received acknowledged her research and discovery of two new elements that were added to the periodic table: polonium and radium. The first she named as an homage to her home country, Poland, and the second element for the Latin word for ray.

During World War I, Marie Curie invented something that has proven critical to today’s fight against COVID-19 — the “Little Curie” — a mobile x-ray unit, which could be transported right to the battlefield, where army surgeons could use x-rays to guide field surgeries.

Today — as nearly all hospital and healthcare systems nationwide (and soon, globally) battle to avoid becoming deluged with new and suspected cases of COVID-19 — radiologists are waging their own fight to provide imaging while keeping equipment clean and ready to go. “The chest x-ray has taken center stage as a frontline diagnostic test for the new coronavirus,” shared Samanjit Hare, a chest radiologist with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, in an editorial published recently in the British Medical Journal.

With a field hospital under construction on a grassy meadow in New York City’s iconic Central Park — and the Jacob Javits Center transformed into a 1,000-bed makeshift hospital to combat COVID-19 — we have brilliant Marie Curie to thank for making portable, on-site radiology possible.

You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for our own improvement.
Marie Curie

About the author.
An award-winning creator and digital health, wellness, and lifestyle content strategist — Karina writes, edits, and produces compelling content across multiple platforms — including articles, video, interactive tools, and documentary film. Her work has been featured on MSN Lifestyle, Apartment Therapy, Goop, Psycom, Pregnancy & Newborn, Eat This Not That, thirdAGE, and Remedy Health Media digital properties.

Known as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” the legendary Hollywood icon Hedy Lamarr, star of Ziegfield Girl and Samson and Delilah, was featured in more than 30 films over her 28-year career — but there was more to her than meets the eye. Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kessler (1914-2000) in Vienna, Hedy Lamarr was many things: a hardworking actress, prolific producer, wife (6 times over!), mother. What you might not know is that she was also an ingenious inventor, engineer — and mother of WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, and other wireless technologies. Digital nomads and remote workers have Hedy Lamarr to thank for their connected existence.

Before arriving in the United States, a 19-year-old Hedwig had been married to Fritz Mandl, a wealthy, domineering, Austrian munitions manufacturer who sold arms to the Nazis. While with him, she had been privy to high-level conversations about weapons design that later came to inform her most important invention. She fled to the United States in the 1930s disguised as a maid, signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio, and became the Hollywood box-office sensation: Hedy Lamarr.

But despite her international stardom, Lamarr was bored with life as a screen star. She devoted a room in her home as her lab for inventing — and worked away at her drafting table instead of making the Hollywood party rounds. She was prolific. Her first invention was a fizzing tablet, which dissolved in water to make a carbonated drink. She sketched blueprints for new machines. Deciding that “airplanes were too slow,” she drafted a biomimetic design for the wings of her lover Howard Hughe’s racing plane — inspired by her study of the fastest fish and bird. Lamarr invented a tissue-box attachment to hold used tissues, a new type of traffic light, and a device to help movement-impaired people get in and out of the bathtub. But her greatest invention was born one sultry summer night in 1940 when Lamarr met her Hollywood neighbor, the avant-garde composer George Antheil. The two shared a passion for creating and a deep curiosity for discovering how things work.

In 1942, at the height of both her career and WWII, they created a “frequency-hopping system” inspired by Lamarr’s knowledge of weapons design and Antheil’s of musical instruments. This secret communications system (patented in 1942) manipulated radio frequencies at irregular intervals, preventing classified messages from being intercepted by the enemy. Although her ideas were ignored at first, the technology was later used by the military during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 — and later formed the fundamental structure of devices we rely on today — like wireless internet, GPS, fax machines, and Bluetooth.

She received very little credit for her achievements — until recently. In 1997, The Electronic Frontier Foundation bestowed her the Pioneer Award, and in 2014 — fourteen years after her death — she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Lamarr also became the first woman to be awarded the Invention Convention‘s BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award. Lamarr never made any money from any of her inventions — “frequency hopping” alone is thought to be worth some tens of billions of dollars — but the United States military has publicly acknowledged her contribution to this enduring technology.

Pioneer. Movie star. Inventor. Scientist. Icon. Hedy Lamarr invented the underpinning technology that makes our smartphones and WiFi work. Basically — we might not be WFH today if it were not for Hedy Lamarr.

“Hope and curiosity about the future seemed better than guarantees. That’s the way I was. The unknown was always so attractive to me … and still is.”
Hedy Lamarr

If you want to learn more, check out Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story.

The hunt is on for a vaccine for the current COVID-19 pandemic — and vaccination for other diseases is now commonplace. But did you know that Catherine the Great, the famed Tsarina of Russia, was one of the early champions of inoculation?

Catherine the Great is Russia’s longest-serving female leader in more ways than one. She embraced new medical advancements and was an early endorser of vaccines. When she came to power in 1762, Russia was a poor, struggling country. In 1767, a smallpox epidemic swept Siberia, swiftly killing some 20,000 people. Smallpox was one of the worst diseases in history — killing nearly 400,000 people every year, 60 million in all — during the 18th century. (And it is the only human disease that has been successfully eradicated.) The Royal family was no exception — Catherine’s husband, the emperor Peter III, survived a severe case of smallpox when he was 16, which left him with disfiguring scars and very little hair.

In 1767, wanting to spare Russian lives, Catherine invited Thomas Dimsdale to court. He was a distinguished British physician who had built upon existing knowledge and created an experimental technique to immunize people to smallpox. It involved deliberately infecting a person with fluid from smallpox pustules, taken from a patient with a milder form of the disease, which resulted in a very mild smallpox infection that was less dangerous than if one contracted the disease by natural means, providing immunity to future attacks. He published his findings in a paper titled: The present methods of inoculation for the smallpox in 1767, which impressed Catherine at a moment when a smallpox epidemic was ravaging Russia.

She became convinced that she and her 14-year-old son, Paul, should be inoculated — and also wanted to prove to the Russian people that this was a safe and effective procedure. She and her son were quietly inoculated on October 12, 1768. The procedure was a success: Catherine developed a mild case of smallpox after but recovered fully two weeks later. She herself then donated pus for the inoculations of various members of her court. They all survived — and inoculation quickly became widely accepted. By the end of the century, nearly 2 million Russians had been inoculated against smallpox. Her belief in science saved the lives of millions of Russians, making Catherine quite

Great indeed.

My objective was, through my example, to save from death the multitude of my subjects who, not knowing the value of this technique, and frightened of it, were left in danger.

Catherine the Great

MARCH 26, 2020 — Freelancers typically have none of the federal or state benefits and protections that regular employees or small businesses do — but the new coronavirus is putting a spotlight on how we work today — and freelancers have been included in an unprecedented manner. Here’s what’s being done now.
black-and-white-photo-of-a-young-woman

There are 57 million freelancers in the United States who are feeling financially squeezed by the growing coronavirus pandemic — but who don’t typically have the same resources or protections as traditional workers. This group includes gig workers, contractors, project-based workers, temporary and part-time hires — who generate $1 trillion in income a year. According to Intuit, about 43% of the workforce will be freelancing in 2020 — nearly half of all American workers. While being your own boss has lots of upsides, it has generally meant missing out on benefits that traditional employees can get on the job, like paid leave when you’re sick or to care for an ailing family member. Until now.

The New Deal brought us unemployment benefits, one of the chief safety nets in tumultuous times of job loss. The system does not usually cover people who are not classified as “employees” — but the COVID-19 stimulus bill that just passed has some really great news. This legislation extends unemployment benefits to a much wider pool of people than ever before, ensuring that all workers — including freelancers, sole proprietors, and gig workers — are protected. Under the new legislation, unemployed workers will collect bigger unemployment checks, along with an additional payment of $600 per week, and will receive those payments for a longer period of time. Details will vary state by state.

As well, another piece of good news for freelancers is that the current stimulus package will provide a one-time payment of up to $1,200 (more if one has kids) to all that make under $99K. Yes, that includes fashion stylists, graphic designers, Uber and Lyft drivers, bartenders, baristas, nannies, house cleaners, web developers, and more. That one-time payment won’t be enough to cover rent or mortgage payments, food, medicine, or other basic necessities (like cleaning supplies) — but it’s a step in the right direction.

Several states already offer paid-leave programs that can help freelancers in times like these — but will not provide immediate help for those that have not yet signed up. Essentially, provisions in the new law, signed by President Trump, will provide a refundable tax credit of up to 100% sick leave pay for self-employed individuals, including freelancers, gig workers, and independent contractors, to help make up for lost income due to the novel coronavirus — which is something. But it won’t directly give self-employed workers paid leave if they or their families become ill.

At the moment, three states — New York, California, and Washington ― offer paid a family and medical leave benefit programs that freelancers can opt into, which typically replaces some portion of a person’s income if they can’t work due to illness or injury that is not job-related, or if they need to care for a sick family member, among other things. Participants typically pay regular premiums to be part of the plan. It offers a measure of assistance, but one that you must pay for yourself. Several other states, including Connecticut, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington D.C., are setting up family and medical leave programs that will also cover self-employed workers. The program in D.C. will begin paying benefits in July, but the others will only take effect in coming years.

But there’s a catch: these state-sponsored programs are often poorly publicized and are not so simple to access. While requirements for these programs vary state by state, people are typically not eligible to collect benefits right after signing up — which means that these programs won’t help people who want to join now, when COVID-19 is upending their lives.

We are making incremental steps towards greater inclusion of all workers in economic policies, and the new unemployment insurance, stimulus check, and proposed tax credit for sick leave is a huge win for freelancers and the self-employed. Perhaps we will emerge from this pandemic crisis with a more humanistic view on how to better care for all the citizens of this country.

We <3 You, Ladies.

Madonna. Florence and the Machine. Dolly Parton. Aretha Franklin. Katy Perry. Beyonce. Billie Eilish. Christine and the Queens. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Shania Twain. Kelis. Stevie Nicks. Demi Lovato. India. Sheryl Crow. Dixie Chicks. Lady Gaga. Helen Reddy. Melissa Etheridge. We <3 you, ladies.

It’s March, traditionally a time we honor women via Women’s History Month — but this year’s celebration has been overshadowed by news surrounding the novel coronavirus. As we settle into our new normal, here’s a bright spot to help take your mind off of everything it’s been consumed by … and it may even be the perfect soundtrack as you work from home.

Check out this Spotify playlist put together by the music mavens at Creative Circle. Titled Women at Work, this musical ode is an homage to all the ladies out there that are breaking barriers and honing their hustle.

Click here to view the playlist.

A few cool facts we bet you didn’t know about some of the artists on our fantastic playlist (if we do say so, ourselves).

ARETHA FRANKLIN

Aretha Franklin’s feminist anthem ‘Respect,’ the powerhouse hit that skyrocketed her to fame at the age of 24, was written by a man. Yes, written by a man. The fact that this iconic song was originally written and recorded by Otis Redding makes Aretha Franklin’s interpretation of the song — and its message of empowerment — all the more powerful.

STEVIE NICKS

At one point—before fame, fortune, or Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham lived together in extreme poverty, sleeping together on a single mattress strewn directly on the floor, no money for a bed frame. The song “Gypsy is about um … going back to the gypsy that I was prior to Fleetwood Mac,” says Stevie Nicks. In later interviews, Nicks shares that she would take her mattress off the frame, “back to the floor” to get back to her gypsy roots — literally, figuratively — when her famous life felt cloying and overwhelming.

DOLLY PARTON

Not only is she beloved as one of the most iconic country music stars, Dolly Parton, born in a one-room cabin with little electricity and no indoor plumbing, went on to release 41 Top-10 country albums, 25 number one singles, and has gone on to amass a net worth of $600 million — and counting. Born the fourth of 12 children, her parents didn’t have the money to pay the doctor who delivered her — so they gave him a bag of oatmeal instead. Her humble beginnings inspired her to be super smart about her business. Dolly launched her own publishing company early on, hanging on to the rights of all her songs — part of what’s made her one of the most successful musical artists ever.

LIZZO

Lizzo, the body-positive singer-songwriter-rapper making major waves in the music industry, started her musical career in a somewhat unexpected place: as a member of her elementary school’s band! Yes, Lizzo is a classically trained flautist who went on to play in the marching band at the University of Houston before becoming the mega-pop star she is today. And she can do something really unique: play flute and twerk at the same time — it’s a bit racy but awe-inspiring: check it here.

MADONNA

One of music’s most radical icons is also its wealthiest. Born in Michigan in 1958, this famous musician was the third of six children in a working-class Italian-American family. Cheers to you, Madonna, for being the wealthiest woman in the music biz, with a net worth of $850 million — and for showing us what grit, determination, and talent can achieve.

. . . . . . . .

We hope you find inspiration in this music and amazing musicians. In these unusual times, we are happy to bring you a break from the coronavirus — let’s celebrate the genius of these (mostly) female artists and get our groove on!

Are Freelancers More Politically Active Than Traditional Workers?

The freelance economy is B-O-O-M-I-N-G. The American dream is being recrafted for the 21st century. The farms, fields, and cubicles of yesteryear are giving way to co-working spaces, laptops, and digital nomadism.

During the past five years — despite a job market offering more full-time jobs — Americans are increasingly choosing to freelance. In fact, more than one in three — or 35% — of Americans freelanced in 2018. According to a recent study called Freelancing in America 2019, the most comprehensive study to date of the independent workforce, there are 56.7 million Americans doing freelance work today — up 3.7 million since 2014. The study, which was commissioned by the Freelancer’s Union, looked at more than 6,000 workers and found that workers are spending more than 1 billion hours per week freelancing — up from 998 million hours in 2015. By all measures, the freelance economy is in ascendancy — and with the numbers of independent workers growing, ripple effects will be felt across multiple sectors.

So what does this mean in terms of political engagement?

One voter segment you scarcely hear anything about is freelancers. This isn’t surprising as most independent workers have been seen as economic outsiders — less politically neat to categorize than middle-class USA and less obviously visible than the vaunted “one percent” — presenting a bit of a pickle to politicians seeking definitive stances in the more classically delineated corners of the workplace economy.

New York is fertile ground for freelancers — think designers, stylists, musicians, writers, nannies, filmmakers, bookkeepers—which helps explain why it’s the home of the Freelancer’s Union. “Freelancing in America report demonstrates the remarkable growth of the freelance workforce over the past five years,” said Caitlin Pearce, Executive Director of the Freelancer’s Union. Independent workers are fast becoming a backbone of the American economy, but they face unique challenges. Issues like affordable and accessible health care, retirement, higher pay, and workforce development training to update skills are particularly germane to freelancers. And with the independent workforce growing, attention to these concerns is on the rise.

One of the key findings in the Freelancing in America study is that freelancers are more politically active than traditional workers.

The world of independent workers is broader than you think and less homogenous. But there are some things that connect the independent working class — greater vulnerability to outside economic forces. Just slight shifts to the economy can have outsize effects on freelancers, which is perhaps why independent workers vote at a far higher rate than the general population. But the study also found that most freelancers don’t feel well-represented by their elected politicians. Politicians and policy makers take note: a whopping 72% of freelancers surveyed said that they’d be willing to cross party lines to support candidates that advocate for freelancers’ interests. Freelancers are “more politically active than the general population” — shared Pearce — “and they’re looking for policymakers to take notice.”

Here’s where organizations like Freelancer’s Union come in. As the largest and fast-growing organization representing the millions of independent American workers across the United States, it provides its 450,000+ members a voice through political advocacy, community, and benefits. As the ranks of freelance workers grows, so does the political impact of the non-traditional worker — and the need for representation. Due in part to the efforts of the Freelancer’s Union, some key reforms were pushed through, including the Unincorporated Business Tax reform and successful advocacy for new health care models that fit the needs of independent workers. And in New York City, reforms provide freelancers unparalleled protections from non-payment.

Freelancers could be key to the upcoming Presidential elections. Here’s why.

The study showed political activity as being 18 points higher than for traditional workers. 51% of freelancers self-identified as politically active versus 33% of non-freelancers — and more than seven in 10 value support for freelancer interests over party loyalty. This means that to win freelancer votes, candidates will need to focus on making health care more affordable and accessible, along with supporting higher pay and plans for retirement savings.

Freelancers are aware that politicians are ignoring the needs of freelancers, who don’t have the safety net of programs like unemployment that might ease financial stress. We have yet to see any national-level politicians focusing on this growing constituency, but with half the population forecast to be freelancing by 2027, independent workers will be much harder to ignore going forward.