Florence Nightingale was born on May 12th, 1820, in Florence (now Italy), into a well-positioned English family. Florence was also considered as the founder of nursing. You’ll learn more about the history of nursing and short biography of Florence Nightingale as you read on
As soon as Nightingale expressed her desire of helping people as a nurse, her family firmly opposed to her aim because they considered nursing as a denigrate job not suitable for a rich woman whose destiny was to marry. But she passed over her family’s rejection and became not only a good nurse, but also the founder of modern nursery and a pioneer of epidemiology and medical statistics.
After achieving a position into the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen, she received a permission to move to Crimea. Along with other 37 volunteer nurses, they go to Crimea in 1854 during the war between England and Russia. Their objective, according to government’s orders, was to help in the improvement of the soldier’s life conditions.
They established in the military hospital of Scutari (now Turkey) and, under Nightingale supervision, the nurses reformed and cleaned the place, and took care of the wounded, sometimes facing the opposition of doctors and officials. But soon, a statistical study showed that mortality had decreased from 40% to 2%, thanks to Nightingale’s works.
After becoming ill herself too, she returned to England in 1857 and firmly decided to keep being a nurse and promoting the improvement of her profession: publishing brochures or even founding a school of nursery in 1860 where she used to expose her own researches. Two years before, she even achieved a position as a member of the British Royal Statistical Society.
Her relevance kept increasing till the point that the USA government called her during the Secession War to reorganize its chain of military campaign hospitals. During the conflict, she succeeded in decreasing the mortality percentage from 44% to 2% of the wounded men.
After returning to England she kept working in nursery, obtaining by her achievements the Royal Red Cross in 1883 and the Order of Merit in 1907. She died in London on August 13th, 1910.