Florence Nightingale: Her life and work
Florence Nightingale 1820 - 1910: leading our past, inspiring our future
Florence Nightingale’s birthday
Those who work in the nursing profession do an amazing job every day for which they should be proud. Their hard work and dedication should be celebrated and what better day to do this on each year than on the anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale, who is widely believed to have been fundamental in establishing modern nursing as we know it today.
The calling
Miss Nightingale was born on 12 May 1820. As a youngster, she developed an interest in social issues and visited the sick in her village. She received a calling to help people and decided that she would like to become a nurse. Her parents refused to allow this as nursing was not considered a suitable profession for a well educated female – nurses were often thought to be drunk, and hospitals were places where only the dying would go. Florence eventually managed to persuade her parents to allow her to begin training and it was this experience that allowed her to travel to Turkey to assist when the Crimean War broke out.
The lady with the lamp
By introducing female nurses into the military hospitals of Turkey, Florence achieved her greatest triumph in making people perceive nursing as a respectable profession for women. She challenged procedures and worked tirelessly to improve supplies and conditions for patients. The comforting sight of her checking that all was well with patients every night earned her the name 'the lady with the lamp’.
A public subscription named the Nightingale Fund was raised in gratitude for all of Florence’s hard work, which allowed her to continue campaigning to improve health standards, publishing over 200 books, reports and pamphlets, and opening a nursing training school within St Thomas’s Hospital.
Her works
In her report Notes on Matters Affecting the Health of the British Army (1858), Florence invented the pie chart by creating statistical charts to show the number of men who died from the conditions in the hospitals compared to those who died from their wounds. This led her to become the first woman elected as a fellow of the Statistical Society, for her contribution to army and hospital statistics.
In 1860 her work, Notes on Nursing, available on the Amazon website was published which heavily influenced the nature of modern health care. It laid down the fundamental principles of nursing, including careful observation and sensitivity to the patient's needs; essential issues whose importance had never been realised before.
Effect on nursing
Florence Nightingale died peacfully in her sleep on 13 August 1910, at the age of 90. By the time of her death she had become one of the most famous and influential women of the nineteenth century. One hundred years on, her publications are still used by health care professionals. She made the nursing profession a respectable and admirable one, improved conditions and caring practices and the shape of the health care profession was immeasurably altered by her life’s work.
See also the timeline of Florence's life and work.