Florence Nightingale

English Statistician

Date of Birth	:	12 May, 1820
Date of Death	:	13 Aug, 1910
Place of Birth	:	Florence, Italy
Profession	:	Nurse, Writer, Statistician
Nationality	:	British, English

Florence Nightingale OM RRC DSTJ was an English social reformer, statistician and founder of modern nursing. Nightingale became famous during the Crimean War as a manager and instructor of nurses, providing care for wounded soldiers in Constantinople. He significantly reduced the death rate by improving hygiene and living standards. Nightingale gave nursing a favorable reputation and became an icon of Victorian culture, particularly in the persona of "The Lady with the Lamp" making rounds of wounded soldiers at night.

Recent commentators have emphasized that Nightingale's Crimean War achievements were exaggerated by the media at the time, but critics agree on the importance of her later work in professionalizing the nursing role for women. In 1860, she laid the foundation for professional nursing by establishing her nursing school at St. Thomas's Hospital in London. It was the world's first secular nursing school and is now part of King's College London. In recognition of her pioneering work in nursing, the Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses and the Florence Nightingale Medal, the highest international honor a nurse can achieve, are named in her honor, and International Nurses Day is celebrated annually on her birthday. His social reforms included improving health care for all classes of British society, advocating better hunger relief in India, helping to repeal prostitution laws that were harsh on women, and expanding acceptable forms of women's participation in the workforce.

Early life

Florence Nightingale was born on 12 May 1820 into a wealthy and well-connected British family at the Villa Colombaia, in Florence, Tuscany, 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, Parthenope, a Greek settlement now part of the city of Naples. The family moved back to England in 1821, with Nightingale being brought up in the family's homes at Embley, Hampshire, and Lea Hurst, Derbyshire.

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

A BBC documentary reported that "Florence and her older sister Parthenope benefited from their father's advanced ideas about women's education. They studied history, mathematics, Italian, classical literature, and philosophy, and from an early age Florence, who was the more academic of the two girls, displayed an extraordinary ability for collecting and analysing data which she would use to great effect in later life."

Crimean War

Florence Nightingale's most famous contribution came during the Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports got back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded at the military hospital on the Asiatic side of the Bosporus, opposite Constantinople, at Scutari (modern-day Üsküdar in Istanbul). Britain and France entered the war against Russia on the side of the Ottoman Empire. On 21 October 1854, she and the staff of 38 women volunteer nurses including her head nurse Eliza Roberts and her aunt Mai Smith and 15 Catholic nuns (mobilised by Henry Edward Manning) were sent (under the authorisation of Sidney Herbert) to the Ottoman Empire. On the way, Nightingale was assisted in Paris by her friend Mary Clarke. The volunteer nurses worked about 295 nautical miles (546 km; 339 mi) away from the main British camp across the Black Sea at Balaklava, in the Crimea.

Nightingale arrived at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari early in November 1854. Her team found that poor care for wounded soldiers was being delivered 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:

This frail young woman ... embraced in her solicitude the sick of three armies.

— Lucien Baudens, La guerre de Crimée, les campements, les abris, les ambulances, les hôpitaux, p. 104.

After Nightingale sent a plea to The Times for a government solution to the poor condition of the facilities, the British Government commissioned Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design a prefabricated hospital that could be built in England and shipped to the Dardanelles. The result was Renkioi Hospital, a civilian facility that, under the management of Edmund Alexander Parkes, had a death rate less than one tenth of that of Scutari.

Later career

In the Crimea on 29 November 1855, the Nightingale Fund was established for the training of nurses during a public meeting to recognise Nightingale for her work in the war. There was an outpouring of generous donations. Sidney Herbert served as honorary secretary of the fund and the Duke of Cambridge was chairman. In her 1856 letters she described spas in the Ottoman Empire, detailing the health conditions, physical descriptions, dietary information, and other vital details of patients whom she directed there. She noted that the treatment there was significantly less expensive than in Switzerland.

Nightingale had £45,000 at her disposal from the Nightingale Fund to set up the first nursing school, the Nightingale Training School, at St Thomas' Hospital on 9 July 1860. The first trained Nightingale nurses began work on 16 May 1865 at the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary. Now called the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, the school is part of King's College London. In 1866 she said the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital in Aylesbury near her sister's home Claydon House would be "the most beautiful hospital in England", and in 1868 called it "an excellent model to follow".

Relationships

Although much of Nightingale's work improved the lot of women everywhere, Nightingale believed that women craved sympathy and were not as capable as men. She criticised early women's rights activists for decrying an alleged lack of careers for women at the same time that lucrative medical positions, under the supervision of Nightingale and others, went perpetually unfilled. She preferred the friendship of powerful men, insisting they had done more than women to help her attain her goals, writing: "I have never found one woman who has altered her life by one iota for me or my opinions." She often referred to herself as, for example, "a man of action" and "a man of business".

However, she did have several important and long-lasting friendships with women. Later in life, she kept up a prolonged correspondence with Irish nun Sister Mary Clare Moore, with whom she had worked in Crimea. Her most beloved confidante was Mary Clarke, an Englishwoman she met in Paris in 1837 and kept in touch with throughout her life.

Some scholars of Nightingale's life believe that she remained chaste for her entire life, perhaps because she felt a religious calling to her career.

Death

Florence Nightingale died peacefully in her sleep in her room at 10 South Street, Mayfair, London, on 13 August 1910, at the age of 90. The offer of burial in Westminster Abbey was declined by her relatives and she is buried in the churchyard of St Margaret's Church in East Wellow, Hampshire, near Embley Park with a memorial with just her initials and dates of birth and death. She left a large body of work, including several hundred notes that were previously unpublished. A memorial monument to Nightingale was created in Carrara marble by Francis William Sargant in 1913 and placed in the cloister of the Basilica of Santa Croce, in Florence, Italy.