Florence Nightingale

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Florence Nightingale, (born 1820 – 1910) was an English social reformer and statistician, as well as the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale rose to fame as a nurse and mentor during the Crimean War, where she coordinated care for wounded soldiers.

Nightingale's Crimean War accomplishments were exaggerated by media, but critics remain cautious about the importance of her later work in specialistizing nursing roles for women.

Nightingale founded her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London in 1860.

It was the first secular nursing school in the United States, and it is now part of King's College London.

The Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses, as the highest international recognition a nurse can achieve, are named in her honour, and the annual International Nurses Day is held on her birthday.

Her social reforms included improved healthcare for all segments of British society, calling for better hunger relief in India, helping to eliminate prostitution laws that were deemed inappropriate for women, and increasing female representation in the workplace. Nightingale was a prolific and versatile writer.

Much of her published work in her lifetime was concerned with spreading medical knowledge.

Many of her tracts were written in plain English so that they could be understood by those with poor literary skills.

She was also a pioneer in the use of infographics, specifically using graphical representations of statistical results.

Much of her writing, which includes extensive research into faith and mysticism, has only been published posthumously.

Early life

Florence Nightingale was born on May 1220 to a wealthy and well-connected British family at the Villa Colombaia, in Florence, Tuscany, Italy, and was named after the city of her birth. Parthenope, Florence's older sister, had been named after her place of birth, Parthenope, a Greek settlement now part of the city of Naples, had been named after her. In 1821, the family returned to England, with Nightingale being brought up in the family's houses in Embley, Hampshire, and Lea Hurst, Derbyshire.

Florence inherited a liberal-humanistic outlook from both her mother and father. William Edward Nightingale, born William Edward Shore (1794–1874) and Frances ("Fanny") Nightingale (née Smith, 1788–1880) was her mother (née Smith). Mary (née Evans), William's niece, was the niece of Peter Nightingale, under the conditions of whose will William inherited his Lea Hurst estate and assumed the name and arms of Nightingale. William Smith, the abolitionist and Unitarian, was Fanny's father (Florence's maternal grandfather). The father of Nightingale was educated in her.

According to a BBC documentary, "Florence and her older sister Parthenope benefited from their father's new theories of women's education." They looked at history, mathematics, Italian, classical literature, and philosophy, as well as an early age Florence, who was the more academic of the two girls, who had an amazing capacity for gathering and analysing data that she would use with great success in later life.

In 1838, her father brought the family on a tour in Europe, where she was introduced to Mary Clarke, an English-born Parisian hostess, with whom Florence bonded. "Clarkey" was a vivacious hostess who didn't particularly care for her appearance, and although her ideas did not always match those of her guests, she said she was "incapable of boring anyone." Her behaviour was described as emetic and eccentric, and she had no regard for upper-class British women, whom she regarded as insignificant. She said that if she had the freedom of the galleys rather than a woman. She generally opposed female corporations and spent her time with male intellectuals. Clarke made an exception, in the case of the Nightingale family and Florence in particular. Despite their 27-year age gap, She and Florence were to remain close friends for 40 years. Women could be equals to men, according to Clarke, who claimed that Florence did not get a divorce from her mother.

Nightingale's first of many experiences that she felt in God in February 1837 while visiting Embley Park sparked a strong desire to dedicate her life to the service of others. She was respectful of her family's opposition to her serving as a nurse in her youth, but she only revealed her intention to work as a nurse in 1844. Despite the rage and sadness of her mother and sister, she turned down the opportunity for a woman of her gender to become a wife and mother. In the face of resistance from her family and the restrictive social code for wealthy young English women, Nightingale worked hard to educate herself in the art and science of nursing.

Nightingale was described as feminine, slender, and graceful as a young woman. Although her demeanour was scathing, she was described as charming and with a radiant smile. Richard Monckton Milnes, a poet and writer, was her most persistent suitor, but after a nine-year courtship, she rejected him, fearing that marriage would prevent her from following her calling to nursing.

Sidney Herbert, a politician who had been on his honeymoon in Rome in 1847, met Sidney Herbert, a wartime diplomat who had been in Rome from 1845-1866. He and Nightingale became lifelong close friends. During the Crimean War, Herbert will be Secretary of War again, and his wife will play a part in Nightingale's nursing duties in Crimea. She was Herbert's top strategist through his political career, although she was accused by some of having hastened Herbert's death from Bright's disease in 1861 due to the pressure her reform effort placed on him. Nightingale had strong links with academic Benjamin Jowett, who may have wished to marry her.

Nightingale continued her travels (now with Charles and Selina Bracebridge) as far as Greece and Egypt. Nightingale saved a juvenile owl from a group of children who were disgusted by it, and she named the owl Athena. The owl was often carried in her purse until it died (soon before Nightingale left for Crimea).

Her writings on Egypt, in particular, are testimony to her study, literary ability, and philosophy of life. She wrote of Abu Simbel temples in January 1850, "Sublime in the highest style of intellectual beauty, intelligence without effort, without suffering..." The whole effect is more reminiscent of spiritual grandeur than anything I could have imagined. It gives the appearance that thousands of voices do, uniting in one common sense of excitement or emotion that is said to have defeated the strongest man."

She wrote of being "called to God" at Thebes, a week later in her diary (as distinct from her much older sister Parthenope's far longer letters): "God called me in the morning and asked me to do good for him alone without a single name." She travelled to Kaiserswerth-am-Rhein, Germany, where she met Pastor Theodor Fliedner and the deaconesses caring for the sick and the homeless. She regarded the experience as a turning point in her life and published her findings anonymously in 1851; The Institute of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, for the Practical Training of Deaconesses, etc. It was her first published work. She underwent four months of medical education at the university, which served as the foundation for her later care.

Nightingale took the position of superintendent at the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street, London, on August 22, 1853, a position she held until October 1854. Her father had an annual income of £500 (roughly £60,000/US$65,000 in current terms), which enabled her to live comfortably and continue working on her career.

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Later career

The Nightingale Fund for the training of nurses was established in the Crimea on November 29th, 1855, at a public meeting to honor Nightingale for her service in the war. There had been an outpouring of generous contributions. Sidney Herbert served as the fund's honorary secretary, and the Duke of Cambridge was chairman. In her 1856 letters she referred to spas in the Ottoman Empire, describing the health of patients, physical descriptions, diet, and other important information that she supervised there. She recalled that the treatment there was much less expensive than in Switzerland.

On Saturday, Nightingale had £45,000 available from the Nightingale Fund to open the first nursing school, the Nightingale Training School, at St Thomas' Hospital. On May 16th, 1865 at the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary, the first trained Nightingale nurses began work. The Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery has renamed the school as part of King's College London. In 1866, she predicted that the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital in Aylesbury, near her sister's house, would be "the most beautiful hospital in England," and that Claydon House, "an excellent model to follow" in 1868.

Notes on Nursing, edited by Nightingale (1859). The book served as the backbone of the Nightingale School and other nursing schools' curriculum, but it was specifically designed for those nursing at home. "Every day, sanitary information, or in other words, of how to structure the constitution in such a way as to prevent disease or recover from illness," Nightingale wrote. It is regarded as the certainty that every one should have, not medical ones, which can only be obtained by a profession.

Nursing Notes on Nursing were also very popular with the general reading public, and is considered a classic introduction to nursing. Nightingale spent the remainder of her life supporting and coordinating the nursing profession. "The book was the first of its kind to be written," Joan Quixley of the Nightingale School of Nursing wrote in the introduction to the 1974 edition. It came at a time when simple rules of health were only becoming recognized, when patients' well-being and recovery were not as important as well as hospitalization. Nurses were still mainly thought of as ignorant, uneducated individuals. The book has inevitably earned its place in nursing history, because it was written by the "father of modern nursing."

One of Nightingale's most notable accomplishments, according to Mark Bostridge, was the introduction of qualified nurses into the workhouse system in the United Kingdom from the 1860s to the present. Sick paupers were no longer being cared for by other, able-bodied paupers, but rather by properly trained nursing staff. Nurses in the first half of the twentieth century were mainly retired servants or widows who had no other occupation and were therefore compelled to work at this occupation. Charles Dickens caricatured the standard of care in his 1842–1843 published book Martin Chuzzlewit's portrayal of Sarah Gamp as incompetent, ineffective, alcoholic, and corrupt. "There was no such thing as nursing" when she [nightingale] started out. Sarah Gamp, the Dickens character, was more interested in consuming gin than caring for her patients, according to a slight exaggeration. Hospitals were hospitalized at the last resort, where the floors were spelled with straw to soak up the blood. When she returned [from Crimea], Florence changed nursing. She had contact in high places and needed to get things done with the help of others. Florence was stubborn, opinionated, and forthright, but she had to do those things in order to achieve all of what she did."

Though Nightingale is often said to have denied the theory of infectious disease for her entire life, a 2008 biography contradicts this, claiming that she was simply opposed to a germ theory that is traditionally thought of as contagionism. Disease could only be transmitted by touch, according to this theory. hardly anyone took germ theory seriously before Pasteur and Lister's experiments; later, many medical doctors were unconvinced. Bostridge points out that Nightingale wrote an essay in which she advocated stringent measures to kill germs, according to her. Nurses in the American Civil War were inspired by Nightingale's work. The Union government contacted her for help in organizing field medicine. The United States Sanitary Commission's volunteer body was inspired by her ideas.

Linda Richards, "America's first trained nurse," was mentored by Nightingale in the 1870s, allowing her to return to the United States with the appropriate training and expertise to create high-quality nursing schools. Richards went on to become a nursing pioneer in the United States and Japan.

Many Nightingale nurses had become matrons at several premier hospitals, including in London (St Mary's Hospital, Westminster Hospital, St Marylebone Workhouse Infirmary, and the Hospital for Incurables at Putney), as well as in Sydney Hospital, Australia (Royal Victoria Hospital, Edinburgh; Cumberland Infirmary and Liverpool Royal Infirmary).

Nightingale was the first recipient of the Royal Red Cross in 1883. She was appointed a Lady of Grace of St John in 1904 (LGStJ).

In 1907, she became the first woman to be honoured the Order of Merit. In the ensuing year, she was awarded the City of London's Honorary Freedom. Her birthday is now recognized as International CFS Awareness Day.

Nightingale was often bedridden and depressed from 1857 to 1929. According to a recent biography, bruchiosis and spondylitis can be the reason. Nightingale's symptoms were limited to a specific form of bruguing, which began to rise in the 1880s. Despite her illness, she was remarkably effective in social reform. She pioneered research in the field of hospital planning, and her career has flourished in Britain and around the world. In her last decade, Nightingale's output slowed drastically. She wrote very little during that time due to blindness and diminishing mental skills, but she maintained an interest in current affairs.

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