Florence Nightingale :: Papers

Florence Nightingale Florence Nightingale was born in 1820. She came from an upper class family that saw her future getting married and raising children. Florence had very different viewpoint, she believed that God wanted her to be a nurse. She fought the OPPOSITION from her parents and studied in Europe from 1849 and in Alexandria in 1850. By 1853, she was the Superintendent at the Institution for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen and she was very interested in the training of nurses. In March 1854 the Crimean War broke out. Telegraphic COMMUNICATIONS were used by war correspondents to broadcast stories back home to encourage people to have opinions on the war and take interest. Many horror stories emerged about the Barrack Hospital in Scutari, where the British wounded were being treated. Sidney Herbert, the Secretary of War and a personal friend of the Nightingale family, made an appeal to Florence to sort out the nursing care in Scutari. Despite the OPPOSITION from the military, Florence took 38 handpicked nurses to work in the hospital. She employed many new standards; privacy curtains, cleaning of sheets, food for patients and she even hired 200 builders to rebuild a ward block. In six months she had managed to reduce the death rate in the hospital from 42% to 2%. After two successful years in the Crimea, Florence returned to Britain with a mission. She appealed to the Queen, sent an 800 page report to the government and wrote a book, "Notes on Nursing" which explained all her methods. This became the standard textbook for generations. By 1860, it was a best seller! Florence had raised  £44,000 and she used this money to set up the Nightingale School of Nursing, in St. Thomas's Hospital, London. Discipline, order and attention to detail were prime factors in her teaching. She also wanted nurses to remain single so that they wouldn't have divided loyalties. She had turned down many offers of marriage. Of the 38 nurses she had taken to the Crimea, 24 were nuns, this was partly due to the fact that there was