History of Florence Nightingale (1820-1910)
Florence Nightingale
Born: 12 May 1820. Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany.
Died: 13 August 1910 (aged 90) Park Lane, London, United Kingdom
Known for: Pioneering modern nursing
Institutions: Selimiye Barracks, Scutari.
Profession: Nurse and Statistician
Specialism: Hospital hygiene and sanitation.
Signature:
Florence Nightingale (12 May 1820 13 August 1910) was a celebrated English nurse,
writer and statistician. An Anglican, Nightingale believed that God had called her to
be a nurse. She came to prominence for her pioneering work in nursing during
Crimean War, where she tended the wounded to soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady
with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night.
Nightingale laid foundation of the 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.
Early life:
Florence Nightingale was born into a rich, upper-class, well-connected British
family at the Villa Colombia, 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.
, Her parents were William Edward Nightingale, born William Edward
Shore (1794-1874) and Frances ("Fanny") Nightingale née Smith (1789-1880).
William's mother Mary née Evans was the niece of one Peter Nightingale, under the
terms of whose will William inherited his estate Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, and
assumed the name and arms of Nightingale. Fanny's father (Florence's maternal
grandfather) was the abolitionist and Unitarian William Smith.
(Little Florence Nightingale)
Inspired by what she took as a call from God in February 1837 while at Embley
Park, Florence announced her decision to enter nursing in 1844, despite the intense
anger and distress of her mother and sister. In this, she rebelled against the expected
role for a woman of her status, which was to become a wife and mother. Nightingale
worked hard to educate herself in the art and science of nursing, in spite of opposition
from her family and the restrictive societal code for affluent young English women.
Nightingale was courted by politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron
Houghton, but she rejected him, convinced that marriage would interfere with her
ability to follow her calling to nursing.
In Rome in 1847, she met Sidney Herbert, a brilliant politician who had
been Secretary at War (1845-1846), a position he would hold again during the
Crimean War. Herbert was on his honeymoon; he and Nightingale became lifelong
,close friends. Herbert and his wife were instrumental in facilitating Nightingale's
nursing work in the Crimea, and she became a key adviser to him in his political
career, though she was accused by some of having hastened Herbert's death from
Bright's Disease in 1861 because of the pressure her programme of reform placed on
him.
Nightingale also much later had strong relations with Benjamin Jowett, who
may have wanted to marry her.
Nightingale continued her travels (now with Charles and Selina Bracebridge) as far
as Greece and Egypt. Her writings on Egypt in particular are testimony to her
learning, literary skill and philosophy of life. Sailing up the Nile as far as Abu Simbel
in January 1850, she wrote -
"I don't think 1 ever saw anything which affected me much more than this." And,
considering the temple: "Sublime in the highest style of intellectual beauty, intellect
without effort, without suffering... not a feature is correct but the whole effect is more
expressive of spiritual grandeur than anything I could have imagined. It makes the
impression upon one that thousands of voices do, uniting in one unanimous
simultaneous feeling of enthusiasm or emotion, which is said to overcome the
strongest man."
At Thebes she wrote of being "called to God" while a week later near Cairo she
wrote in her diary (as distinct from her far longer letters that her elder sister
Parthenope was to print after her return): "God called me in the morning and asked
me would I do good for him alone without reputation." Later in 1850, she visited the
Lutheran religious community at Kaiserswerth-am-Rhein in Germany, where she
observed Pastor Theodor Fliedner and the deaconesses working for the sick and the
deprived. She regarded the experience as a turning point in her life, and issued her
findings anonymously in 1851; The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, for the
Practical Training of Deaconesses, etc. was her first published work; she also
received four months of medical training at the institute which formed the basis for
her later care.
, On 22 August 1853, Nightingale took the post of superintendent at the
Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street, London, a
position she held until October 1854. Her father had given her an annual income of
£500 (roughly £40,000/US$65,000 in present terms), which allowed her to live
comfortably and to pursue her career.
Crimean War:
Florence Nightingale's most famous contribution came during the
Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports began to filter back to
Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. On 21 October 1854, she and
a staff of 38 women volunteer nurses, trained by Nightingale and including her aunt
Mai Smith, were sent (under the authorization of Sidney Herbert) to the Ottoman
Empire, about 295 nautical miles (546 km; 339 mi) across the Black Sea from
Balaklava in the Crimea, where the main British camp was based.
Nightingale arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari
(modem-day Istanbul). She and her nurses found wounded soldiers being badly
cared for by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference. Medicines
were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were
common, many of them fatal. There was no equipment to process food for the
patients.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was asserted that Nightingale reduced the
death rate from 42% to 2% either by making improvements in hygiene herself or by
calling for the Sanitary Commission. The 1911 first edition of the Dictionary of
National Biography made this claim, but the second edition in 2001 did not.
However, death rates did not drop: they began to rise. The death count was the
highest of all hospitals in the region.
,During her first winter at Scutari, 4,077 soldiers died there. Ten times more soldiers
died from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle
wounds. Conditions at the temporary barracks hospital were so fatal to the patients
because of overcrowding and the hospital's defective sewers and lack of ventilation.
A Sanitary Commission had to be sent out by the British government to Scutari in
March 1855, almost six months after Florence Nightingale had arrived, and effected
flushing out the sewers and improvements to ventilation. Death rates were sharply
reduced. During the war she did not recognize hygiene as the predominant cause of
death, and she never claimed credit for helping to reduce the death rate.
Nightingale continued believing the death rates were due to poor nutrition
and supplies and overworking of the soldiers. It was not until after she returned to
Britain and began collecting evidence before the Royal Commission on the Health
of the Army that she came to believe that most of the soldiers at the hospital were
killed by poor living conditions. This experience influenced her later career, when
,she advocated sanitary living conditions as of great importance. Consequently, she
reduced deaths in the army during peacetime and turned attention to the sanitary
design of hospitals.
The Lady with the Lamp:
During the Crimean war Florence Nightingale gained the nick name "The Lady with
the Lamp", deriving from a phrase in a report in The Times:
She is a 'ministering angel' without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her
slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with
gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night
and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she
may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.
[Lady with the lamp (Florence Nightingale), 24th February,
1855]
,The phrase was further popularized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1857 poem
"Santa Filomena":
"Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room."
Later career:
While she was in the Crimea, on 29 November 1855, a public meeting to
give recognition to Florence Nightingale for her work in the war led to the
establishment of the Nightingale Fund for the training of nurses. There was an
outpouring of generous donations. Sidney Herbert served as honorary secretary of
the fund, and the Duke of Cambridge was chairman. Nightingale was considered a
pioneer in the concept of medical tourism as well, on the basis of her letters from
1856 in which she wrote of spas in the Ottoman Empire, detailing the health
conditions, physical descriptions, dietary information, and other vitally important
details of patients whom she directed there (where treatment was significantly less
expensive than in Switzerland). It may be assumed [citation needed] she was
directing patients of meagre means to affordable treatment.
By 1859 Nightingale had £45,000 at her disposal from the Nightingale Fund
to set up the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas' Hospital on 9 July 1860. (It
is now called the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery and is part
of King's College London.) The first trained Nightingale nurses began work on 16
May 1865 at the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary. She also campaigned and raised
funds for the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital in Aylesbury, near her family home.
Nightingale wrote Notes on Nursing, which was published in 1859, a slim
136-page book that served as the cornerstone of the curriculum at the Nightingale
School and other nursing schools established, though it was written specifically for
the education of those nursing at home. Nightingale wrote "Every day sanitary
knowledge, or the knowledge of nursing, or in other words, of how to put the
constitution in such a state as that it will have no disease, or that it can recover from
, disease, takes a higher place. It is recognized as the knowledge which everyone
ought to have distinct from medical knowledge, which only a profession can have".
Notes on Nursing also sold well to the general reading public and is
considered a classic introduction to nursing. Nightingale spent the rest of her life
promoting the establishment and development of the nursing profession and
organizing it into its modern form. In the introduction to the 1974 edition, Joan
Quigley of the Nightingale School of Nursing wrote: "The book was the first of its
kind ever to be written. It appeared at a time when the simple rules of health were
only beginning to be known, when its topics were of vital importance not only for
the well-being and recovery of patients, when hospitals were riddled with infection,
when nurses were still mainly regarded as ignorant, uneducated persons. The book
has, inevitably, its place in the history of nursing, for it was written by the founder
of modern nursing".
(Florence Nightingale, circa 1858)
Nightingale was an advocate for the improvement of care and conditions in the
military and civilian hospitals in Britain. Among her popular books are Notes on
Hospitals, which deals with the correlation of sanitary techniques to medical
facilities; Notes on Nursing, which was the most valued nursing textbook of the day;
Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of
the British Army.
As Mark Bostridge has recently demonstrated, one of Nightingale's
signal achievements was the introduction of trained nurses into the workhouse
Florence Nightingale
Born: 12 May 1820. Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany.
Died: 13 August 1910 (aged 90) Park Lane, London, United Kingdom
Known for: Pioneering modern nursing
Institutions: Selimiye Barracks, Scutari.
Profession: Nurse and Statistician
Specialism: Hospital hygiene and sanitation.
Signature:
Florence Nightingale (12 May 1820 13 August 1910) was a celebrated English nurse,
writer and statistician. An Anglican, Nightingale believed that God had called her to
be a nurse. She came to prominence for her pioneering work in nursing during
Crimean War, where she tended the wounded to soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady
with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night.
Nightingale laid foundation of the 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.
Early life:
Florence Nightingale was born into a rich, upper-class, well-connected British
family at the Villa Colombia, 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.
, Her parents were William Edward Nightingale, born William Edward
Shore (1794-1874) and Frances ("Fanny") Nightingale née Smith (1789-1880).
William's mother Mary née Evans was the niece of one Peter Nightingale, under the
terms of whose will William inherited his estate Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, and
assumed the name and arms of Nightingale. Fanny's father (Florence's maternal
grandfather) was the abolitionist and Unitarian William Smith.
(Little Florence Nightingale)
Inspired by what she took as a call from God in February 1837 while at Embley
Park, Florence announced her decision to enter nursing in 1844, despite the intense
anger and distress of her mother and sister. In this, she rebelled against the expected
role for a woman of her status, which was to become a wife and mother. Nightingale
worked hard to educate herself in the art and science of nursing, in spite of opposition
from her family and the restrictive societal code for affluent young English women.
Nightingale was courted by politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron
Houghton, but she rejected him, convinced that marriage would interfere with her
ability to follow her calling to nursing.
In Rome in 1847, she met Sidney Herbert, a brilliant politician who had
been Secretary at War (1845-1846), a position he would hold again during the
Crimean War. Herbert was on his honeymoon; he and Nightingale became lifelong
,close friends. Herbert and his wife were instrumental in facilitating Nightingale's
nursing work in the Crimea, and she became a key adviser to him in his political
career, though she was accused by some of having hastened Herbert's death from
Bright's Disease in 1861 because of the pressure her programme of reform placed on
him.
Nightingale also much later had strong relations with Benjamin Jowett, who
may have wanted to marry her.
Nightingale continued her travels (now with Charles and Selina Bracebridge) as far
as Greece and Egypt. Her writings on Egypt in particular are testimony to her
learning, literary skill and philosophy of life. Sailing up the Nile as far as Abu Simbel
in January 1850, she wrote -
"I don't think 1 ever saw anything which affected me much more than this." And,
considering the temple: "Sublime in the highest style of intellectual beauty, intellect
without effort, without suffering... not a feature is correct but the whole effect is more
expressive of spiritual grandeur than anything I could have imagined. It makes the
impression upon one that thousands of voices do, uniting in one unanimous
simultaneous feeling of enthusiasm or emotion, which is said to overcome the
strongest man."
At Thebes she wrote of being "called to God" while a week later near Cairo she
wrote in her diary (as distinct from her far longer letters that her elder sister
Parthenope was to print after her return): "God called me in the morning and asked
me would I do good for him alone without reputation." Later in 1850, she visited the
Lutheran religious community at Kaiserswerth-am-Rhein in Germany, where she
observed Pastor Theodor Fliedner and the deaconesses working for the sick and the
deprived. She regarded the experience as a turning point in her life, and issued her
findings anonymously in 1851; The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, for the
Practical Training of Deaconesses, etc. was her first published work; she also
received four months of medical training at the institute which formed the basis for
her later care.
, On 22 August 1853, Nightingale took the post of superintendent at the
Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street, London, a
position she held until October 1854. Her father had given her an annual income of
£500 (roughly £40,000/US$65,000 in present terms), which allowed her to live
comfortably and to pursue her career.
Crimean War:
Florence Nightingale's most famous contribution came during the
Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports began to filter back to
Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. On 21 October 1854, she and
a staff of 38 women volunteer nurses, trained by Nightingale and including her aunt
Mai Smith, were sent (under the authorization of Sidney Herbert) to the Ottoman
Empire, about 295 nautical miles (546 km; 339 mi) across the Black Sea from
Balaklava in the Crimea, where the main British camp was based.
Nightingale arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari
(modem-day Istanbul). She and her nurses found wounded soldiers being badly
cared for by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference. Medicines
were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were
common, many of them fatal. There was no equipment to process food for the
patients.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was asserted that Nightingale reduced the
death rate from 42% to 2% either by making improvements in hygiene herself or by
calling for the Sanitary Commission. The 1911 first edition of the Dictionary of
National Biography made this claim, but the second edition in 2001 did not.
However, death rates did not drop: they began to rise. The death count was the
highest of all hospitals in the region.
,During her first winter at Scutari, 4,077 soldiers died there. Ten times more soldiers
died from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle
wounds. Conditions at the temporary barracks hospital were so fatal to the patients
because of overcrowding and the hospital's defective sewers and lack of ventilation.
A Sanitary Commission had to be sent out by the British government to Scutari in
March 1855, almost six months after Florence Nightingale had arrived, and effected
flushing out the sewers and improvements to ventilation. Death rates were sharply
reduced. During the war she did not recognize hygiene as the predominant cause of
death, and she never claimed credit for helping to reduce the death rate.
Nightingale continued believing the death rates were due to poor nutrition
and supplies and overworking of the soldiers. It was not until after she returned to
Britain and began collecting evidence before the Royal Commission on the Health
of the Army that she came to believe that most of the soldiers at the hospital were
killed by poor living conditions. This experience influenced her later career, when
,she advocated sanitary living conditions as of great importance. Consequently, she
reduced deaths in the army during peacetime and turned attention to the sanitary
design of hospitals.
The Lady with the Lamp:
During the Crimean war Florence Nightingale gained the nick name "The Lady with
the Lamp", deriving from a phrase in a report in The Times:
She is a 'ministering angel' without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her
slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with
gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night
and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she
may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.
[Lady with the lamp (Florence Nightingale), 24th February,
1855]
,The phrase was further popularized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1857 poem
"Santa Filomena":
"Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room."
Later career:
While she was in the Crimea, on 29 November 1855, a public meeting to
give recognition to Florence Nightingale for her work in the war led to the
establishment of the Nightingale Fund for the training of nurses. There was an
outpouring of generous donations. Sidney Herbert served as honorary secretary of
the fund, and the Duke of Cambridge was chairman. Nightingale was considered a
pioneer in the concept of medical tourism as well, on the basis of her letters from
1856 in which she wrote of spas in the Ottoman Empire, detailing the health
conditions, physical descriptions, dietary information, and other vitally important
details of patients whom she directed there (where treatment was significantly less
expensive than in Switzerland). It may be assumed [citation needed] she was
directing patients of meagre means to affordable treatment.
By 1859 Nightingale had £45,000 at her disposal from the Nightingale Fund
to set up the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas' Hospital on 9 July 1860. (It
is now called the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery and is part
of King's College London.) The first trained Nightingale nurses began work on 16
May 1865 at the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary. She also campaigned and raised
funds for the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital in Aylesbury, near her family home.
Nightingale wrote Notes on Nursing, which was published in 1859, a slim
136-page book that served as the cornerstone of the curriculum at the Nightingale
School and other nursing schools established, though it was written specifically for
the education of those nursing at home. Nightingale wrote "Every day sanitary
knowledge, or the knowledge of nursing, or in other words, of how to put the
constitution in such a state as that it will have no disease, or that it can recover from
, disease, takes a higher place. It is recognized as the knowledge which everyone
ought to have distinct from medical knowledge, which only a profession can have".
Notes on Nursing also sold well to the general reading public and is
considered a classic introduction to nursing. Nightingale spent the rest of her life
promoting the establishment and development of the nursing profession and
organizing it into its modern form. In the introduction to the 1974 edition, Joan
Quigley of the Nightingale School of Nursing wrote: "The book was the first of its
kind ever to be written. It appeared at a time when the simple rules of health were
only beginning to be known, when its topics were of vital importance not only for
the well-being and recovery of patients, when hospitals were riddled with infection,
when nurses were still mainly regarded as ignorant, uneducated persons. The book
has, inevitably, its place in the history of nursing, for it was written by the founder
of modern nursing".
(Florence Nightingale, circa 1858)
Nightingale was an advocate for the improvement of care and conditions in the
military and civilian hospitals in Britain. Among her popular books are Notes on
Hospitals, which deals with the correlation of sanitary techniques to medical
facilities; Notes on Nursing, which was the most valued nursing textbook of the day;
Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of
the British Army.
As Mark Bostridge has recently demonstrated, one of Nightingale's
signal achievements was the introduction of trained nurses into the workhouse
