Florence Nightingale, OM, RRC (12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) was a celebrated English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing. She came to prominence while serving as a nurse during the Crimean War, where she tended to wounded soldiers. She was known as The Lady with the Lamp after her habit of making rounds at night. Early 21st century commentators have asserted Nightingales achievements in the Crimean War had been exaggerated by the media at the time, to satisfy the publics need for a hero, but her later achievements remain widely accepted. In 1860, Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment of her nursing school at St Thomas Hospital in London. It was the first secular nursing school in the world, now part of Kings College London. The Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses was named in her honour, and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday. Her social reforms include improving healthcare for all sections of British society, improving healthcare and advocating better hunger relief in India, helping to abolish laws regulating prostitution that were over-harsh to women, and expanding the acceptable forms of female participation in the workforce. Nightingale was a prodigious and versatile writer. In her lifetime much of her published work was concerned with spreading medical knowledge. Some of her tracts were written in simple English so that they could easily be understood by those with poor literary skills. She also helped popularise the graphical presentation of statistical data. Much of her writing, including her extensive work on religion and mysticism, has only been published posthumously. Florence Nightingale was born on 12 May 1820 into a rich, upper-class, well-connected British family at the Villa Colombaia, in Florence, Italy, and was named after the city of her birth. Florences older sister Frances Parthenope had similarly been named after her place of birth, Parthenopolis, a Greek settlement now part of the city of Naples. When Florence was 1, the family moved back to England in 1821, with Nightingale being brought up in the familys homes at Embley and Lea Hurst. Nightingale continued her travels (now with Charles and Selina Bracebridge) as far as Greece and Egypt. Her writings on Egypt in particular are testimony to her learning, literary skill and philosophy of life. Her parents were William Edward Nightingale, born William Edward Shore (1794–1874) and Frances (Fanny) Nightingale née Smith (1789–1880). Williams mother Mary née Evans was the niece of one Peter Nightingale, under the terms of whose will William inherited his estate at Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, and assumed the name and arms of Nightingale. Fannys father (Florences maternal grandfather) was the abolitionist and Unitarian William Smith. Nightingale was educated mainly by her father. Nightingale underwent the first of several experiences that she believed were calls from God in February 1837 while at Embley Park, prompting a strong desire to devote her life to the service of others. In her youth she was respectful of her familys opposition to her working as a nurse, only announcing her decision to enter the field in 1844. Despite the intense anger and distress of her mother and sister, she rebelled against the expected role for a woman of her status to become a wife and mother. Nightingale worked hard to educate herself in the art and science of nursing, in spite of opposition from her family and the restrictive social code for affluent young English women. As a young woman, Nightingale was attractive, slender and graceful. While her demeanor was often severe, she could be very charming and her smile was radiant. Her most persistent suitor was the politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, but after a nine-year courtship she rejected him, convinced that marriage would interfere with her ability to follow her calling to nursing. In Rome in 1847, she met Sidney Herbert, a politician who had been Secretary at War (1845–1846). Herbert was on his honeymoon; he and Nightingale became lifelong close friends. Herbert would be Secretary of War again during the Crimean War; he and his wife were instrumental in facilitating Nightingales nursing work in the Crimea. She became a key adviser to him in his political career, though she was accused by some of having hastened Herberts death from Brights Disease in 1861 because of the pressure her programme of reform placed on him. Nightingale also much later had strong relations with Benjamin Jowett, who may have wanted to marry her. Nightingale continued her travels (now with Charles and Selina Bracebridge) as far as Greece and Egypt. Her writings on Egypt in particular are testimony to her learning, literary skill and philosophy of life At Thebes, she wrote of being called to God, while a week later near Cairo she wrote in her diary (as distinct from her far longer letters that her elder sister Parthenope was to print after her return): God called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for him alone without reputation. Later in 1850, she visited the Lutheran religious community at Kaiserswerth-am-Rhein in Germany, where she observed Pastor Theodor Fliedner and the deaconesses working for the sick and the deprived. She regarded the experience as a turning point in her life, and issued her findings anonymously in 1851; The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, for the Practical Training of Deaconesses, etc. was her first published work;+ she also received four months of medical training at the institute, which formed the basis for her later care. On 22 August 1853, Nightingale took the post of superintendent at the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street, London, a position she held until October 1854.[8] Her father had given her an annual income of £500 (roughly £40,000/US$65,000 in present terms), which allowed her to live comfortably and to pursue her career. Florence Nightingales most famous contribution came during the Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports got back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. On 21 October 1854, she and the staff of 38 women volunteer nurses that she trained, including her aunt Mai Smith, and fifteen Catholic nuns (mobilised by Henry Edward Manning) were sent (under the authorisation of Sidney Herbert) to the Ottoman Empire. They were deployed about 295 nautical miles (546 km; 339 mi) across the Black Sea from Balaklava in the Crimea, where the main British camp was based. Nightingale arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari (modern-day Üsküdar in Istanbul). Her team found that poor care for wounded soldiers was being delivered by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference. Medicines were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were common, many of them fatal. There was no equipment to process food for the patients. After Nightingale sent a plea to The Times for a government solution to the poor condition of the facilities, the British Government commissioned Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design a prefabricated hospital that could be built in England and shipped to the Dardanelles. The result was Renkioi Hospital, a civilian facility which, under the management of Dr. Edmund Alexander Parkes, had a death rate less than 1/10th that of Scutari. Stephen Paget in the Dictionary of National Biography asserted that Nightingale reduced the death rate from 42% to 2%, either by making improvements in hygiene herself, or by calling for the Sanitary Commission. However, death rates actually began to rise to the highest of all hospitals in the region. During her first winter at Scutari, 4,077 soldiers died there. Ten times more soldiers died from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. With overcrowding, defective sewers and lack of ventilation, the Sanitary Commission had to be sent out by the British government to Scutari in March 1855, almost six months after Florence Nightingale had arrived. The commission flushed out the sewers and improved ventilation. Death rates were sharply reduced, but she did not recognise hygiene as the predominant cause of death at the time and never claimed credit for helping to reduce the death rate.[14] In 2001 and 2008 the BBC released documentaries that were critical of Nightingales performance in the Crimean War, as were some follow-up articles published in The Guardian and the Sunday Times. Nightingale scholar L. McDonald has dismissed these criticisms as often preposterous, arguing they are not supported by the primary sources. Nightingale still believed that the death rates were due to poor nutrition, lack of supplies and overworking of the soldiers. After she returned to Britain and began collecting evidence before the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, she came to believe that most of the soldiers at the hospital were killed by poor living conditions. This experience influenced her later career, when she advocated sanitary living conditions as of great importance. Consequently, she reduced peacetime deaths in the army and turned her attention to the sanitary design of hospitals and the introduction of sanitation in working-class homes. ***Matilda of Flanders** Owner
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 14:39:21 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015