Florence Nightingale ｜ The Most Pivotal Reformist In Medical History

Florence Nightingale was a pioneer of public health and the founder of modern nursing. Because of Florence Nightingale, nursing is one of the most regulated and respected professions in the world. Named after her city of birth, Florence, Italy, Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, into an upper-class British family. As a woman of her time and her class, it would have been expected that she would marry, maintain a lovely home, and be a hostess. But Florence Nightingale had very different plans. Though at the time nursing was not a respected profession, Nightingale felt very called to become a nurse. At age 24, Nightingale defied her parents' expectations to marry a suitable match and left England to study at the Kaiserswerth Hospital in Dusseldorf, Germany. When she returned from Germany, she took a job as a nurse at a hospital in London, and she was eventually promoted after only a year to be head of nursing there. She improved sanitary conditions so much that she garnered a reputation as a reformer and as an advocate for public health. During the Crimean War, the British press made public the horrendous conditions of the wounded soldiers in Turkey. The army turned to Florence Nightingale for help. Sydney Herber, secretary at war, reached out directly to Nightingale. When Nightingale and her band of nurses arrived at Skutari, the hospital in the Crimea, they were shocked at what they found. The field hospitals were positioned on cesspools of putrid water. Patients were lying in their filth. More soldiers were dying from infections than they were from wounds sustained on the battlefield. Many of the reforms that Florence Nightingale instituted were quite revolutionary. Nightingale insisted that there be fresh air and water for all the soldiers, that recuperating soldiers receive healthy food to eat to help make them better, and that all of the bandages and sheets and blankets were adequately laundered each day. By the time she was done, Florence Nightingale had succeeded in reducing the death rate within these military hospitals by two-thirds. Known as the Angel of the Crimea, Nightingale returned to England and received a hero's welcome, a medal from Queen Victoria, and a gift of $250,000. She devoted the rest of her life to effecting change in medical care. In 1860, Florence Nightingale founded at St. Thomas Hospital in London the Nightingale Training School for Nurses. She was a pioneer in the use of cutting-edge statistical methods of the time to design hospitals and medical systems to maximize the health of the community at large. This really helped her to make her message known to the parliamentarians and government agencies who would make important decisions about hospitals and health care. In her later years, Nightingale was officially honored by Germany, France, Norway, and numerous prestigious British societies. She died at her London home on August 13, 1910. The fact that we have a nursing profession today is in large part thanks to the work of Florence Nightingale.