International nursing day

annual observance held on May 12 that commemorates the birth in 1820 of Florence Nightingale, the foundational philosopher of modern nursing. The event, established in 1974 by the International Council of Nurses (ICN), also serves to highlight the important role nurses fulfill in health care.

Nightingale became an important figure in nursing in the 1850s during the Crimean War. At that time she was stationed at the Barrack Hospital at Scutari (Üsküdar; now a district of Istanbul), where she headed a group of nurses that cared for injured British soldiers. When she first arrived at the hospital, she was struck by the desperate condition of the facilities, and as a result she imposed strict standards of care and ensured that the wards were kept clean and well stocked with food and medical supplies. Nightingale’s experiences at Scutari led her to campaign for reform in health care and nursing, and in 1860 she opened the Nightingale School of Nursing at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. The school’s success prompted the establishment of similar training schools for nurses elsewhere. Among these early institutions were a nursing school at Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary (now Sydney Hospital) in Australia, which opened in 1868 and was headed by St. Thomas-trained nurse Lucy Osburn; the Bellevue Training School for Nurses in New York, which opened in 1873 and was the first institution in the United States founded on Nightingale’s principles; and a nursing school in Fuzhou, China, which was established in 1888 by American nurse Ella Johnson and was that country’s first Nightingale-based teaching institution. These pioneering schools provided a fertile foundation for the subsequent growth and advance of the modern nursing profession.