![]() ![]() She established a laundry so that patients would have clean linens. She instituted the creation of an “invalid’s kitchen” where appealing food for patients with special dietary requirements was cooked. In addition to vastly improving the sanitary conditions of the hospital, Nightingale created a number of patient services that contributed to improving the quality of their hospital stay. The soldiers, who were both moved and comforted by her endless supply of compassion, took to calling her “the Lady with the Lamp.” Others simply called her “the Angel of Crimea.” Her work reduced the hospital’s death rate by two-thirds. In the evenings she moved through the dark hallways carrying a lamp while making her rounds, ministering to patient after patient. Nightingale herself spent every waking minute caring for the soldiers. She procured hundreds of scrub brushes and asked the least infirm patients to scrub the inside of the hospital from floor to ceiling. The no-nonsense Nightingale quickly set to work. More soldiers were dying from infectious diseases like typhoid and cholera than from injuries incurred in battle. The most basic supplies, such as bandages and soap, grew increasingly scarce as the number of ill and wounded steadily increased. Patients lay on in their own excrement on stretchers strewn throughout the hallways. The hospital sat on top of a large cesspool, which contaminated the water and the hospital building itself. She quickly assembled a team of 34 nurses from a variety of religious orders and sailed with them to the Crimea just a few days later.Īlthough they had been warned of the horrid conditions there, nothing could have prepared Nightingale and her nurses for what they saw when they arrived at Scutari, the British base hospital in Constantinople. In late 1854, Nightingale received a letter from Secretary of War Sidney Herbert, asking her to organize a corps of nurses to tend to the sick and fallen soldiers in the Crimea. ![]() But, after the Battle of Alma, England was in an uproar about the neglect of their ill and injured soldiers, who not only lacked sufficient medical attention due to hospitals being horribly understaffed but also languished in appallingly unsanitary and inhumane conditions. The poor reputation of past female nurses had led the war office to avoid hiring more. By 1854, no fewer than 18,000 soldiers had been admitted into military hospitals.Īt the time, there were no female nurses stationed at hospitals in Crimea. Thousands of British soldiers were sent to the Black Sea, where supplies quickly dwindled. The British Empire was at war against the Russian Empire for control of the Ottoman Empire. ![]() In October of 1853, the Crimean War broke out. She had just barely recovered when the biggest challenge of her nursing career presented itself. Nightingale made it her mission to improve hygiene practices, significantly lowering the death rate at the hospital in the process. The position proved challenging as Nightingale grappled with a cholera outbreak and unsanitary conditions conducive to the rapid spread of the disease. Her performance there so impressed her employer that Nightingale was promoted to the superintendent within just a year of being hired. In the early 1850s, Nightingale returned to London, where she took a nursing job in a Middlesex hospital for ailing governesses. Nightingale explained her reason for turning him down, saying that while he stimulated her intellectually and romantically, her “moral…active nature…requires satisfaction, and that would not find it in this life.” Determined to pursue her true calling despite her parents’ objections, in 1844, Nightingale enrolled as a nursing student at the Lutheran Hospital of Pastor Fliedner in Kaiserwerth, Germany. When Nightingale was 17 years old, she refused a marriage proposal from a “suitable” gentleman, Richard Monckton Milnes. During the Victorian Era, a young lady of Nightingale’s social stature was expected to marry a man of means-not take up a job that was viewed as lowly menial labor by the upper social classes. In fact, her parents forbade her to pursue nursing. When Nightingale approached her parents and told them about her ambitions to become a nurse, they were not pleased. ![]() She believed it to be her divine purpose. By the time she was 16 years old, it was clear to her that nursing was her calling. Florence was raised on the family estate at Lea Hurst, where her father provided her with a classical education, including studies in German, French and Italian.įrom a very young age, Florence Nightingale was active in philanthropy, ministering to the ill and poor people in the village neighboring her family’s estate. Florence’s father was William Shore Nightingale, a wealthy landowner who had inherited two estates-one at Lea Hurst, Derbyshire, and the other in Hampshire, Embley Park-when Florence was five years old. ![]()
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