Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) is a Victorian lady whose name is one of the most famous and recognized in the field of nursing. She was an English social reformer, statistician and founder of modern nursing. She was born in Florence, Italy, to an affluent British family. From a very young age she was active in philanthropy and ministry to the ill and poor people in the village neighboring her family's estate.
In 1844, Miss Nightingale enrolled as a nursing student in a German hospital. Her family had forbidden her to do this since it was contrary to the social status she held during the Victorian Era.
In the early 1850s, she took a job in a London hospital for ailing governesses. She quickly impressed her employer with her performance. She recognized that a cholera outbreak was spreading rapidly due to unsanitary conditions. She made it her mission to improve hospital hygiene conditions.
She later gained fame while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War (1853-1856) in which she organized care for wounded soldiers.
Nightingale became a statistics and data visualization pioneer who sought to illustrate that simple sanitation techniques, such as proper hand washing, could halt the spread of infectious diseases.
In the mid-1800s, even basic sanitation was not well understood or even widely practiced. Her ideas and persistence led to patients at hospitals receiving access to fresh air, bedpans, clean utensils, bed linens and towels. She carried out many studies, wrote numerous articles, founded a training school for nurses, and helped establish visiting nurse services. Even after she became partially bedridden, she continued to work helping to change and improve the quality of health care.
Remembering that in the past hospitals were often dreaded places to go, it was Florence Nightingale who offered some clearheaded advice.
"It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the first requirement in a hospital, that it should do the sick no harm,” she said.
