- Born
- Died
- Nickname
- The Lady with a Lamp
- English nurse and hospital reformer. Florence Nightingale was named after the place of her birth in Italy. Educated at home by their wealthy, well-bred father, Nightingale and her older sister Parthenope studied history, philosophy, mathematics, and classics; they also wrote weekly compositions. Nursing was considered a profession for the lower-classes and that time, however Florence decided that was what she wanded to do. She trained as a nurse at Kaiserswerth (1851) and Paris and in 1853 became superintendent of a hospital for invalid women in London. In the Crimean War she volunteered for duty and took 38 nurses to Scutari in 1854. She organized the barracks hospital after the Battle of Inkerman (5 November) and by imposing strict discipline and standards of sanitation reduced the hospital mortality rate drastically. She returned to England in 1856 and a fund of L 50,000 was subscribed to enable her to form an institution for the training of nurses at St Thomas's and at King's College Hospital. She devoted many years to the question of army sanitary reform, to the improvement of nursing and to public health in India. Her main work, Notes on Nursing (1859), went through many editions.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Sujit R. Varma
- Her birth took place during her parents' trip to Italy. She grew up in wealthy circumstances in Derbyshire and Embley Park in Hampshire, not far from London. She received her education through private lessons. This time was also associated with numerous trips through Europe. Numerous acquaintances with intellectual and time-critical personalities led to an early, emancipated attitude for the Victorian era. In particular, her family's high standard of living became the impetus for her social responsibility towards the lower class, who suffered from poor medical care. Against her parents' wishes, she refused to marry the wealthy writer and politician Richard Milnes in order to train as a nurse in the German town of Kaiserswerth near Düsseldorf in 1851. The reason for moving to Germany was that the nursing profession had not yet been trained in England. After three months, she traveled to Paris in the same year, 1851, to learn the nursing methods of the "Sisters of Mercy".
In 1853 she became head of a sanatorium for sick governesses in London. In the wake of the outbreak of the Crimean War that same year, Nightingale traveled at his own request with 38 nurses to the Scutari military hospital (now Üsküdar in Istanbul, Turkey). Despite numerous bureaucratic hurdles with the British military, which perceived her help as interference, she organized the entire construction of a supply structure. The care of the wounded soldiers took place under the most primitive conditions and was made more difficult by a cholera epidemic due to inadequate hygienic facilities. Since these organizations took up the entire day, it was only at night that she found the time to see the wounded herself, earning her the name "Lady with the Lamp." When Florence Nightingale became ill with hemorrhagic fiber, she was forced to leave Crimea in August 1857. Up to this point, she had organized 125 nursing staff. The sisters' organizational success was overwhelming. The English press, however, gave her the name "Angel of Mercy." At times she fed up to 4,000 soldiers at the same time. Within three months, its nurses provided clothing and supplies to approximately 10,000 soldiers.
Meanwhile, she had become one of the most popular people in England. In 1858, Nightingale became the first woman to be appointed to the Royal Statistical Society. She also became an honorary member of the American Statistical Association. The reason for this was their development of complex statistics on wounded and healing rates of soldiers under different conditions. Florence Nightingale published her experiences in the books "Notes of Hospital". She summarized her nursing principles in the "Notes on nursing", which were published in 1859 and 1860. From a fundraiser she was able to use a donation of 50,000 pounds to establish the Florence Nightingale Foundation, which established a nursing school at St. Thomas Hospital in London in 1860. This model set an example internationally and led to the founding of numerous nursing schools based on its model. She also became a co-developer of the idea of community nurses who provide home care for the poor. In 1861 a midwifery school was founded at Kings College Hospital in London.
She also earned money as a consultant to the British healthcare system. Nightingale had a significant influence on the Swiss philanthropist Henry Dunant (1828-1910), who subsequently founded the Red Cross. In 1867, her birthday was first proclaimed as official "Nursing Day" by the World Association of Nurses.
Florence Nightingale died on August 13, 1910 in London.
In Germany, in 1975, the deaconess hospital in Kaiserswerth near Düsseldorf, where she once received her training as a nurse, was posthumously named the "Florence Nightingale Hospital" in her honor.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Christian_Wolfgang_Barth
- Had a hospice named after her near Stoke Mandeville.
- She was quite subversive for her time.
- She was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1907, the first woman to be appointed to that Order.
- And I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.
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