Florence Nightingale was a British nurse and social reformer whose nickname was "the lady with the lamp". Now recognised as the founder of modern nursing, the 19th century pioneer was behind the world's first nursing school connected to a fully operational hospital.
The icon of the Victorian era was a great advocate of sanitary living conditions to reduce death rates. She was also an innovator who used statistical data to create visuals, such as graphs and diagrams, to spread medical knowledge, even to people with poor literacy.
Her pioneering nursing work is still honoured today, when new nurses take the "Nightingale Pledge" - a version of the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors who commit to upholding their professional ethical standards.
The highest distinction nurses can achieve is the Florence Nightingale Medal, and the International Nurses Day is celebrated annually on her birthday, 12th May.
Nightingale's early life
Born in 1820 in Florence, Italy, Nightingale was the daughter of wealthy British parents, William and Frances Nightingale. The family returned to England when she was one year old. They had two family homes, at Lea Hurst in Derbyshire and Embley in Hampshire.
William had advanced ideas about education for women and the young Florence studied mathematics, history, Italian, philosophy and classical literature. Highly intelligent, she had an astounding ability to collect and analyse data.
As a young woman, Nightingale had few female friends, preferring to spend her time having intellectual conversations with male companions.
In 1844, she decided to become a nurse to help others, rejecting the role of becoming a wife and mother, which was the norm for wealthy young women in the 19th century. A prolific writer, both in her diary and in letters, she wrote of being "called to God" to help others.
How did she thrive in her career?
Nightingale became famous for her nursing role during the Crimean War between Russia and an alliance of the United Kingdom, the Ottoman Empire, France and Sardinia-Piedmont.
She set off for the battlefields on 21st October 1854, with 38 female volunteer nurses and 15 Catholic nuns. They travelled 339 miles across the Black Sea from the main British camp in the Ottoman Empire to a remote field hospital at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari.
Nightingale became known as the "lady with the lamp" because she would walk around the wounded soldiers at night, the dark ward lit only by her lamp, to check on their wellbeing.
She was shocked at the substandard care available for wounded soldiers: overstretched medical staff didn't have sufficient medicines or supplies to assure even basic hygiene standards. The soldiers suffered from often fatal mass infections as a result.
Food was in short supply and there was no equipment to even prepare meals properly. In a desperate plea to The Times newspaper, she felt the British government was indifferent to their plight.
As a result, the famous English civil engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was tasked with designing a prefabricated hospital, Renkioi Hospital, which was shipped to the Dardanelles warzone, subsequently reducing the death rate.
Civilian nursing achievements
Nightingale's efforts to aid the wounded and sick soldiers in the Crimean War led to the establishment of the Nightingale Fund on 29th November 1855. It was launched to recognise her war work and to train nurses.
She had written many letters describing her work in the Ottoman Empire, noting the health conditions she encountered, physical descriptions of injuries and illnesses, dietary needs and other details of the patients she came into contact with. She used her talents as a statistician to explain the information, using graphs and diagrams in a simple way that even non-medical people could understand.
After becoming the Royal Statistical Society's first female member in 1858, she went on to become the first woman to receive the Order of Merit in 1907.
World's first nursing school
Nightingale's pioneering work and popularity led to very generous donations totalling £45,000 to the Nightingale Fund. This enabled her to launch the world's first nursing school connected directly to a hospital on 9th July 1860.
The Nightingale Training School was set up at St Thomas' Hospital in London. The first nurses who had trained there started work on 16th May 1865 at Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary.
Now called the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, the training school is still operational as part of King's College, London.
Her book, Notes on Nursing, published in 1859, was part of the curriculum at the Nightingale training facility and other nursing schools, and it is still considered a classic nursing book today, almost 160 years after its publication.
Other career achievements
One of her most significant achievements was introducing trained nurses into the British workhouse system from the 1860s onwards. Sick paupers could be treated by nursing staff for the first time, rather than being cared for by their peers who had no medical training.
Prior to Nightingale's nursing school, it was not a respected profession. Usually widows or former servants who didn't have a job were forced to earn a living - nursing was a means to survive.
She also advocated a new structure of nursing leadership, with matrons who had control over their nursing staff assisting the smooth running of hospitals. By the 1880s, many Nightingale-trained nurses had become matrons at top hospitals all over the UK.
Nightingale was awarded further accolades, including becoming the first recipient of the Royal Red Cross in 1883. She was appointed Lady of Grace of the Order of St John in 1904.
When she died at the age of 90 in 1910, she had completely transformed the nursing profession, improving not only patient care and hospitals, but also making nursing a respected profession with highly-trained personnel. Her methods are the cornerstone of modern nursing methods and practices.
She was also backed by the Royal Sanitary Commission of 1868–1869 in pressing the government for compulsory sanitation in private houses. As a result, the proposed Public Health Bill was strengthened to require existing properties to be connected to mains drainage. The legislation was enforced in the Public Health Acts of 1874 and 1875.
Historians believe this played a key role in increasing the average national life expectancy by 20 years between 1871 and the mid-1930s.
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