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Florence Nightingale
Life Details
Born: May 12th, 1820. Died: August 13th, 1910.
Introduction
The founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale was an English social reformer, and statistician. She served during the Crimean War, and was famed as the "Lady with the Lamp". She was born in Florence, and her parents gave her the same name after starting the tradition with her older sister, Frances Parthenope. They moved back to England shortly after and she spent her childhood in luxury at the two family homes in Embley Park, Hampshire and Lea Hurst, Derbyshire.
Post-War Work
After the Crimean War, Nightingale embarked on revolutionising the nursing role, by setting up a nursing school at St. Thomas' Hospital in 1860. This was the first secular nursing school in the world. Even today, her presence is felt, where new nurses take the Nightingale Pledge, a paraphrase of the Hippocratic oath, and there are medals awarded named after her that nurses can achieve.
Her work also contained statistics. She represented her analysis in graphical forms to show that her work was correct, and even developed her own version of a pie chart, often referred to as a polar area diagram. It is the equivalent to a modern circular histogram.
Some of her works included the view on different aspects of life. It included areas such as the health of the British Army in India, where she showed that bad drainage, contaminated water, overcrowding and poor ventilation were causing high death rates. Because of this report that she made showing these issues, she campaigned for sanitary conditions to be improved in the country as a whole.
Her Legacy
Nightingale's legacy includes the nursing attributes, and it wasn't until after her death that, during the Vietnam War, she inspired US Army nurses due to the nature of what she did during the war.
During the first lockdown in 2020 in the UK, on the bicentenary of her death, three temporary hospitals were set up to prepare for a rise in patients who needed critical care following the spread of COVID-19. They were all named Nightingale hospitals and the first was housed within the ExCeL building in London.
Death
Florence Nightingale died in 1910. Her death was simply old age, and she left behind a whole litany of unpublished works, a nursing standard that is still followed to this day, and who gained social reform, medicine development and sanitation awareness. She was awarded the Order of Merit posthumously.
