Florence Nightingale Biography

Florence Nightingale was a famous English nurse, known for her work in the Crimean War. Florence Nightingale was born in 1820 in Florence, Italy, for which she was named. Nightingale was inspired to enter nursing from a calling from God in 1837. She worked hard at educating herself in the science and art of nursing, despite continuing opposition from her family. Nightingale began travelling, and met Sidney Herbert in Rome in 1847. Herbert had been secretary at war until 1946, and would later return to this position during the Crimean War. Nightingale and Herbert became close friends, and she then went on to travel to Egypt and Greece, where she began writing, and then underwent four months of training in Kaiserwerth in Germany in 1851. This enabled her to become superintendent at the Institute for Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street, London, until 1854. During the Crimean War, reports began to filter back to London about the horrific conditions that wounded soldiers had to endure, so on the 21st of October 1854, Florence and her trained 38 volunteer nurses were sent by Sidney Herbert to the Selimiye Barracks in modern-day Istanbul, Turkey. Nightingale and her team found terrible conditions for the wounded in the barracks, with huge numbers of fatalities from infection and poor hygiene, as well as a lack of medicine and supplies. Nightingale sent a plea to the Times newspaper to implore the government to send aid, and a prefabricated hospital was constructed in England and shipped to the Dardanelles. The overcrowding in the hospital and the defective sewers proved to be so fatal to the patients that a sanitary commission was sent to the hospital in 1855, which improved ventilation and flushed out the sewers. The death rates sharply fell, but Nightingale continued to maintain that poor nutrition and overworking was leading to the high death rates. It wasn't until she returned to England and began collecting data that she discovered that most of the soldiers died from poor living conditions. This greatly influenced her career, and she began to advocate sanitary conditions in hospitals. In 1855, the Nightingale Fund was set up to fund the training of nurses, and in 1859, the Nightingale Training School, now called the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery, was set up, and the first nurses began working in 1865. In 1870, Nightingale trained Linda Richards, America's first trained nurse, who went on to become a great nursing pioneer in the USA and Japan. Nightingale was awarded several honours by Queen Victoria, but was bedridden from 1957 onwards. She continued to write and carried out pioneering work on hospital planning, but died at the age of 90 in 1910. Her lasting legacy is that of founding the modern nursing profession with her compassion, patient care and hospital planning. International Nurses Day is celebrated on her birthday every year.