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Without a shadow of a doubt the most famous nurse in the history of the profession, Florence Nightingale achieved an enormous amount of reform in the medical world, especially that of the military, through her tireless work throughout all her career. If she hadn’t pushed through these reforms it could have been many more years before the military hospitals of the world were relatively free from the grip of diseases associated with a lack of hygiene.
Named after the Italian city in which she was born to British parents, Florence Nightingale involved a privileged and cultured upbringing in England. She enjoyed a thorough education encompassing all academic areas, from science to music. She was great friends with her Dad, who valued her for her companionship. He had campaigned against slavery throughout his adult life, so perhaps this is where Florence got some of her inspiration for her actions later on in life.
Contrastingly, her mother was rather domineering, and swayed by the popular actions of the day, only had one thing in mind for her daughter – marriage. The social climate in England at that time dictated that women of a middle to upper class standing should marry and tend to the home, perhaps pursuing a hobby of some sort in times of boredom. But Florence Nightingale had other ideas. In retrospect she claimed to have felt a spiritual calling from God in her teenage years. After rejecting several hands of marriage, she shocked her family and mother in particular by declaring she wished to become a nurse. It was not only the fact that she wished to take up a full time profession that dismayed the family, more that nurses of the time were at best working class, and were rumoured to have rather base social habits.
Undeterred by the parental protestations, Florence eventually received some formal training in nursing in her early thirties. Within a few years she had risen through the ranks, and had become known as a leading authority on the state and running of hospitals in England.
Because of her expertise, in 1854 she was allowed to travel to Scutari in Turkey, with a team of thirty-eight trained nurses, where British soldiers were fighting in the Crimean War. Conditions in the military hospitals of the time were known to be bad, but nothing could have prepared the nurses for the sight of the filthy wards and decaying men. Soldiers lay on beds with no blankets, still in full uniform apart from the scraps that had been blown off by enemy gunfire, allowed to rot in their unwashed state. Rats were commonplace and unsurprisingly disease was rife. They were of the worst kind too – typhoid, cholera and dysentery – it was very rare for a person to survive after contracting one of these deadly abominations.
Florence Nightingale set about drawing up plans to restructure and reform the hospitals. The male surgeons of the time weren’t happy at what they saw as a meddling woman, but backed by a newspaper campaign in Britain highlighting the disgraceful conditions, she was soon able to make a start. Aided by her ‘Handmaidens Of The Lord’, the team of nurses, by the time the war had ended she had greatly improved sanitation and nutrition in the hospitals, effectively counteracting disease. Her penchant for working late caused her to be nicknamed ‘The Lady With The Lamp’.
Whilst tending to the wounded of the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale contracted Crimean fever, and never really recovered. On returning to Britain she soon became an invalid. This didn’t prevent her from continuing her pioneering work in the world of medicine though. In 1859 she helped to find the Visiting Nurses Association, and a year late established a school that became a model for model nursing. Her reputation as a nurse was well known throughout the world and this caused her to be used in an advisory capacity by the United States during their civil war. She was also the first woman to receive the British Order of Merit, and in her very last years was recognised as a pioneer of the Red Cross Movement.
A remarkable woman who believed that God had empowered her especially to help the injured and improve their facilities, Florence Nightingale, helped to pull hospitals from the Middle Ages into the modern world. The amazing woman known as 'The Lady With The Lamp' died peacefully aged ninety in 1910.
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