Strong & Powerful Women: Florence Nightingale
In May 12th, 1820, in Florence, Italy, Florence Nightingale was born. Her parents Frances Nightingale and William Shore Nightingale were of the high class. Her mother was born into a rich family and grew up to be a socialite and her father was a wealthy land owner.
With her having a wealthy family, she went to a great school and her studies were in three different languages, French, German and Italian.
When she was sixteen she already knew what she wanted to be, a nurse. Unfortunately, her parents didn't like this idea at all, in fact, they forbid her from pursuing her dream. She was then proposed to by a young man named Richard Monckton Milnes, in which she refused due to her wanting to pursue her dream of becoming a nurse and helping people.
With her parents disapproval, she enrolled into the Lutheran Hospital of Pastor Fliedner in Kaiserwerth, Germany. She then took a job in London as a nurse in which she excelled in.
In 1853, the Crimean War broke out and a large amount of soldiers were admitted into military hospitals. Unfortunately, there was a shortage of nurses because the previous nurses had a horrible reputation and caused the war office to avoid hiring more nurses to help out. But with the shortage of the nurses, the increase of injured soldiers, and the hospital being extremely unsanitary, the war office knew that it was time things changed.
That's when Florence received a letter from the Secretary of War, Sidney Herbert, explaining the situation that they were in and to assemble a team of nurses to come help the soldiers. She did exactly that and went on with 34 nurses to help out the injured and sick men.
Though they were told about the situation of the hospital, they were definitely not prepared for what they saw when they got there. As they walked through the halls of the hospital they saw rodents and bugs of all kinds scurrying past them and patients lying down on stretchers in their own faeces . The hospital also failed to keep up with the supplies that were needed such as soap and bandages because of the increasing number of sick and injured people.
Florence and her team of nurses began the large task of cleaning up the hospital and cleaning the linen for the patients to sleep on. Florence also decided that it would be a great idea for the hospital to have a library and a classroom for the patients to be able to entertain themselves. With all the great things Florence did, she was loved by all the patients.
When things fell into place, Florence went back home to Lea Hurst and when she got there she was welcomed back with open arms and large crowds of people. The queen awarded her $250,000 for her hard work and instead of using that money for herself, she funded the St. Thomas Hospital and within the hospital was the Nightingale Training School for Nurses. Young women of all classes enrolled into the nursing school.
Unfortunately a few years later Florence contracted Crimean Fever and never recovered, she eventually got bedridden. Even with this disease, she continued to work, she published Notes on Hospital, which mainly spoke about how to properly run hospitals. She was also consulted on how to manage field hospitals and although she had never travelled to India, she was made an authority on public sanitation issues in India for both civilians and military.
Florence Nightingale made it her mission in life to prevent unhygienic hospitals for people and provide amazing treatment for those who needed it.
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He used to perform nightly rounds with a lamp for better patient care; everyone appreciated her sense of charity and her respectful and compassionate treatment, for which some called her "the lady of the lamp"