FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

A Nurse at Heart

Florence Nightingale was born into a wealthy British family on May 12, 1820. She had every privilege available: clothes, parties, lessons, servants, horses . . . but she was bored and frustrated with her life. She wanted to do something useful. At the age of sixteen, she wrote in her diary: "On Feb. 7, God spoke to me and called me to His service." What service, she didn’t know. But as she grew to womanhood she realized she felt most fulfilled when she was nursing the sick in the poor cottages around Embley, the family home.

But in the 1840s, nurses had a poor reputation as drunkards, prostitutes, and "maids-of-all-work." It was considered unsuitable for "proper" English women from good families to work in a common hospital. Florence was thirty-three years old before she persuaded her parents to let her take her first nursing job in a private hospital for "gentlewomen."

But when England and France declared war on Russia in 1854, the English government asked Florence Nightingale to take a team of nurses to the Crimea. Conditions in the military hospitals were terrible; many more soldiers died from disease, poor food and water, and neglect than died from enemy wounds.

She discovered that fighting "the army way of doing things" was an uphill battle—but at the end of the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale was a national heroine. Funds were raised to establish the Nightingale School of Nursing in London. Until her death in 1910, she worked tirelessly to reform health and medical care in the army. She is now considered the "founder of modern nursing" not only in England, but all over the world.