Year 1890 (MDCCCXC) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Monday of the Julian calendar.

Joseph Carey Merrick (5 August 1862 – 11 April 1890), sometimes incorrectly referred to as John Merrick, was an English man with severe deformities who was exhibited as a human curiosity named the Elephant Man. He became well known in London society after he went to live at the London Hospital. Merrick was born in Leicester and began to develop abnormally during the first few years of his life. His skin appeared thick and lumpy, he developed an enlargement of his lips, and a bony lump grew on his forehead. One of his arms and both feet became enlarged and at some point during his childhood he fell and damaged his hip, resulting in permanent lameness. When he was 11, his mother died and his father soon remarried. Merrick left school at 12, and had difficulty finding employment. Rejected by his father and stepmother, he left home. In late 1879, aged 17, Merrick entered the Leicester Union workhouse.

In 1884, after four years in the workhouse, Merrick contacted a showman named Sam Torr and proposed that Torr should exhibit him. Torr agreed, and arranged for a group of men to manage Merrick, whom they named the Elephant Man. After touring the East Midlands, Merrick travelled to London to be exhibited in a penny gaff shop on Whitechapel Road which was rented by showman Tom Norman. Norman's shop, directly across the street from the London Hospital, was visited by a surgeon named Frederick Treves, who invited Merrick to be examined and photographed. Soon after Merrick's visits to the hospital, Tom Norman's shop was closed by the police and Merrick's managers sent him to tour in Europe.

Florence Nightingale OM, RRC ( /ˈflɒrəns ˈnaɪtɨŋɡeɪl/; 12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) was a celebrated English nurse, writer and statistician. She came to prominence for her pioneering work in nursing during the Crimean War, where she tended to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night. An Anglican, Nightingale believed that God had called her to be a nurse.

Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment, in 1860, of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London, the first secular nursing school in the world, now part of King's College London. The Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses was named in her honour, and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday.

Florence Nightingale was born into a rich, upper-class, well-connected British family at the Villa Colombaia, near the Porta Romana at Bellosguardo in Florence, Italy, and was named after the city of her birth. Florence's older sister Frances Parthenope had similarly been named after her place of birth, Parthenopolis, a Greek settlement now part of the city of Naples.

Fredrik Carl Mülertz Størmer (3 September 1874 – 13 August 1957) was a Norwegian mathematician and physicist, known both for his work in number theory and for studying the movement of charged particles in the magnetosphere and the formation of aurorae.

Størmer was born on 3 September 1874 in Skien, the only child of a pharmacist Georg Ludvig Størmer (1842–1930) and Elisabeth Amalie Johanne Henriette Mülertz (1844–1916). He was a nephew of Henrik Christian Fredrik Størmer.

He studied mathematics at the Royal Frederick University (now: University of Oslo) from 1892 to 1897, earning the rank of candidatus realium in 1898. He then studied with Picard, Poincaré, Painlevé, Jordan, Darboux, and Goursat at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1898 to 1900. On his return to Kristiania in 1900 as a research fellow in mathematics, he married Ada Clauson, with whom he eventually had five children. He visited the University of Göttingen in 1902, and returned to Kristiania in 1903, where he was appointed as a professor of mathematics, a position he held for 43 years. After he received a permanent position in Kristiania, Størmer published his subsequent writings under a shortened version of his name, Carl Størmer. In 1918, he was elected as the first president of the newly-formed Norwegian Mathematical Society. He participated regularly in Scandinavian mathematical congresses, and was president of the 1936 International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo (from 1924 the new name of Kristiania). Størmer was also affiliated with the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo, which was founded in 1934. He died on 13 August 1957, at Blindern.

Maria Goretti (October 16, 1890 – July 6, 1902) is an Italian virgin-martyr of the Roman Catholic Church, and is one of its youngest canonized saints. She died from multiple stab wounds inflicted by her attempted rapist after she refused to submit to him.

Goretti was born Maria Teresa Goretti on October 16, 1890 in Corinaldo, in the Province of Ancona, then in the Kingdom of Italy, to Luigi Goretti and Assunta Carlini. She was the third out of six children. Her sisters were named Teresa and Ersilia; her brothers were Angelo, Sandrino, and Mariano.

By the time she was six, her family had become so poor that they were forced to give up their farm, move, and work for other farmers. Soon, Maria's father Luigi became very sick with malaria, and died when Maria was just nine. While her brothers, mother, and sister worked in the fields, Maria would cook, sew, watch her infant sister, and keep the house clean. It was a hard life, but the family was very close. They shared a deep love for God and the faith. She and her family moved to Le Ferriere, near modern Latina and Nettuno in Lazio, where they lived in a building, "La Cascina Antica," they shared with another family which included Giovanni Serenelli and his son, Alessandro.