Florence nightingale birth and death

“The lady with the lamp” and her contributions to modern nursing “The lady with the lamp” and her contributions to modern nursing Published On: February 25, 2015 Shared by Florence Nightingale, 1856 The largest profession, and the profession that is consistently ranked as the most trusted profession in the United States, is that of nursing. The foundations of nursing practiced across the world were pioneered by the greatest figure in nursing history, Florence Nightingale. She helped to define nursing practice by suggesting that nurses did not need to know all about the disease process like the medical field. They needed to know how to care for a patient through the environment, helping the patient deal with symptoms and changes in function related to illness. Early Life and Training Florence Nightingale was born May 12, 1820, in Florence, Italy and was named after the city of her birth. She died on August 13, 1910, at the age of 90 after living a long, productive life in which her ideas and contributions helped to shape the way nursing is practiced in the western world. Florence Nightingale was born to an upper-class English family. Her father William Shore Nightingale was a wealthy landowner and her mother Frances Nightingale a socialite who hailed from a family of wealthy merchants. From a young age Florence Nightingale assisted the poor and ill people in the village neighboring her estate, and by the age of 16 she considered nursing to be her life’s calling. In the Vict...

Nursing lore has long maintained that the mysterious illness that sent Florence Nightingale to bed for 30 years after her return from the Crimea was syphilis. At least that’s what many nursing students were told in the 1960s, when my wife was working on her BSN. Syphilis, however, would be difficult to reconcile with the fact that Nightingale was likely celibate her entire life and had not a single sign or symptom typical of that venereal infection. Even so, Nightingale’s was a decidedly strange illness, one that has stubbornly defied diagnosis since her death on this day 95 years ago. In all likelihood, its seed was sown in 1854, when in her mid-30s, she traveled to Skutari (Uskudar), Turkey to care for British soldiers fighting the Russians in what came to be known as the Crimean War. With a mere 38 nurses, she supervised the care of an all but endless stream of troops wracked by frostbite, gangrene, dysentery, and other diseases crammed into 4 miles of beds not 18 inches apart. Her own quarters were cramped and infested with rodents and vermin. During January and February of her first winter, she saw 3,000 of her patients die, while working 20 hours a day, caring for the severest cases herself. In May of the following year, she developed a near-fatal illness (most likely brucellosis). Although urged to return to England to recuperate, she remained with the Army for 21 months until the last soldier had left for home. Image Credit: “Florence Nightingale.” Public Domain vi...

Discover how one remarkable woman changed the face of nursing forever in ourFlorence Nightingale facts… Have you or your family ever been poorly and had to go to hospital? Did you notice all the hard work the nurses were doing to care for the patients and help them get better? Today, nurses are recognised as important, super-skilled professionals. But that hasn’t always been the case. Believe it or not, at the start of the 19th century, nurses usually had no training at all, and they weren’t even paid for the ‘menial’ work they did! But one woman changed all that… meet the amazing Florence Nightingale. Florence Nightingale facts Who was Florence Nightingale? Born: 12 May 1820 in Florence, Italy Lived in: England, UK Occupation: Nurse Died: 13 August 1910 Best known for: Founding modern nursing Also known as: Lady with the Lamp Florence Nightingale was born in the city of Florence, 12 May 1820 whilst her parents were enjoying a long honeymoon. And yup, you guessed it – that’s how she got her name! Her parents were called William and Fanny Nightingale, and she had one older sister, too – Frances Parthenope, AKA ‘Pop’. William Nightingale was a wealthy banker and was able to provide his family with a very privileged life. They had servants and two lovely houses – a winter home in Hampshire and a summer home in Derbyshire. At the time that Florence was a youngster, most girls didn’t go to school– in fact, many didn’t receive any education at all! But William was ...

Lea Hurst, the summer home of the Nightingale familyFlorence Nightingale was born in 1820 to wealthy English parents traveling in Florence, Italy. Both Florence and her sister were named after the Italian cities in which they were born – her sister Parthenope was born in Naples and given the Greek name for its ancient city. At home in England, the Nightingales divided their time between two houses, Lea Hurst in Derbyshire for the summer and Embley in Hampshire for the winter. The two girls were educated by their father, and Florence, in particular, excelled academically. With regard to the marriage and social life of their daughters, the Nightingales held high expectations. However, Florence had other ideas, because as a teenager in 1837 she received a "divine calling” to do God’s work, which sparked her advocacy of social and health care causes and eventually led her to establish nursing as a distinct profession. Pastor Theodore Fliedner, founder of the Lutheran deaconesses training center for nurses in Kaiserwerth, GermanyThe period between the later half of the 17th century and the middle of the 19th has been described by medical historian Fielding Garrison as the “dark age” of nursing. Nurses in those days were typically poor, unskilled and often associated with immoral behavior (1). The hospitals they served held equally low reputations as unclean, disorderly, and infection breeding. They were often regarded merely as places to die. So it is not difficult to see why F...

Florence Nightingale, known as the Crimean War’s ‘Lady with the Lamp’ was a pioneering 19 th-century nurse and social reformer. Overcoming formidable family opposition and the straitjacket of Victorian society, she changed the face of military nursing and laid the foundations for modern hospital nursing and its elevation into a profession. Here we look at her life and enduring legacy. Early Life Florence Nightingale and her sister Parthenope with their mother Frances, 1828 © Wellcome Collection Florence came from a wealthy well-connected liberal-humanitarian family. Unusual for a Victorian, her father William Nightingale believed in women’s education. The sisters were clever and he personally educated them in modern and classical languages, history, philosophy and mathematics. Florence and her sister spent their childhoods in the two substantial country houses owned by their parents – Embley Park, near Romsey, Hampshire (above) and Lea Hurst, Matlock, Derbyshire.© Wellcome Collection. Both properties are listed Grade II Despite her intellectual ability, Florence was still expected to conform to the social restraints of the 19th-century by making a good marriage, keeping home, and bearing children. However, after visiting poor and sick villagers near her Derbyshire home, as well as successfully nursing her family and their servants during a flu epidemic, Florence found her vocation; a ‘divine calling’ she wrote. She told her parents she wanted to train as a nurse. Portrait ...

Florence Nightingale: Maternal Mortality and Gender Politics Paper for the History of Nursing Conference of the Canadian Association for the History of Nursing 9 June 2006, St Paul’s Hospital, Vancouver, B.C. by Lynn McDonald, PhD Dept. of Sociology, University of Guelph Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) addressed the issue of high rates of maternal mortality post-childbirth early on in her professional career, and continued to seek solutions over the next decades, indeed into her old age. The second project of the Nightingale Fund, raised in her honour in the Crimean War, was to fund a midwifery-nurse training program at King’s College Hospital, led by Mary Jones, the nurse (and Anglican sister) Nightingale most respected, and from whom she had learned much of her own nursing practice. But the maternity ward that was set up for this purpose—King’s did not then have a maternity ward—and the school itself were closed early in 1867 on account of excessive rates of puerperal fever. There is comprehensive coverage of this whole complicated process in Florence Nightingale on Women, Medicine, Midwifery and Prostitution, 2005, volume 8 of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (8:141-408; later citations give volume and page number only). This volume includes a critical edition of Nightingale’s pioneering Introductory Notes on Lying-in Institutions, 1871 (8:249-329). Here I wish to focus attention on two aspects of the issue: the statistics on maternal mortality from puerpera...