While cleaning out our library, I ran across an interesting little book about Florence Nightingale. Not sure where it came from, but there were only about 10 or 12 pages, so I read through it. Here’s some interesting things that I didn’t know….
Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820 in Florence, Italy — she was named for that city.
In 1854, she led a group of 38 nurses to care for British soldiers wounded in the Crimean War.
She is best known as the founder of modern nursing. Before Florence came along, the female nurses in British hospitals were mostly Roman Catholic nuns or prostitutes. Florence gets credit for making it a safe and respectable profession for women.
Her parents opposed her desire to be a nurse, but they made sure she got an education. Florence and her sister were tutored in Italian, Latin, history, Greek, and mathematics.
Mostly because of her family’s opposition to her career choice, and her inability to make a decision about a long-standing marriage proposal, she suffered a short-lived mental breakdown.
She pioneered the use of graphs for statistical representation. Her work showed, for the first time, that social events could be objectively measured and subjected to mathematical analysis.
Among her hospital innovations were hot water piped to all floors, the installation of dumbwaiters to bring patients’ food, and bells for patients to call nurses.
The small booklet she wrote, Notes on Nursing, published in 1861, was a multi-million-copy bestseller.
After returning from the Crimean War, Florence was plagued with illness — and post traumatic stress disorder. She spent most of the rest of her life confined to bed.
Even though her father objected to Florence going into nursing, he never rejected her after she became a nurse. William Nightingale provided an income of 500 pounds a year for her — the equivalent of around $50,000 today.
She was uninterested in her celebrity status and refused photographs and interviews, and never appeared at public functions — even those given in her honor. She was such a recluse, in fact, a lot of people thought she was dead long before her actual time of passing.
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