Florence Nightingale: Pioneer of modern nursing who made hospitals cleaner, safer

Florence Nightingale is the British ‘Lady with the lamp’ who became famous for her role in the Crimean war in 1854. No! She didn’t carry gun, neither did she fight in the war. She was a nurse and one of those highly regarded as pioneers of modern nursing,

Nightingale battled societal constraints and went against the wish of her parents to become not just a nurse but world’s famous nurse who worked and wrote advisory letters on nursing late into her life. She set new principles and championed the revolution that led to the improvement of conditions in hospitals, changing them from filthy environment where patients were contracting infectious diseases that killed them faster than the ailment that had led them to seek medical help.

She had no reason to train as a nurse which was not regarded as a respectful profession at that time. Her father was a wealthy banker and she lived in a time when most girls don’t go to school, but her father gave her lessons in science, history and maths. When she announced to her parents at age 16 that she heard a voice from God calling her to become a nurse, it didn’t sit well with them but they had to allow her in 1851.

In 1854 when the Crimean War broke out which was just three years after she became a certified nurse after training in Germany, Nightingale was in London running a women’s hospital when she was summoned by the British Minister for War to lead a team of nurses to Crimea (an area in the south of Russia, now part of Ukraine) where British soldiers were dying from battle wounds, cold, hunger and sickness, with no real medical care or nurses to attend to them.

Britain, France and Turkey were fighting against Russia in the war. When Nightingale and her team arrived the Army hospital, what they found was disgusting. A filthy and overcrowded health facility, with blocked drains and broken toilets, everywhere was stinking and wounded soldiers had to sleep on the dirty floor, without blankets to keep warm, clean water to drink or fresh food to eat. Disease spread quickly and most of the soldiers died from infections faster than wounds sustained from the war. This prompted her to put in efforts to improve conditions at the health facility because for her that’s the first step to guarantee quick recovery for the ailing soldiers.

What did she do?

She bought better medical equipment, decent food, and paid for workmen to clear the drains. She led her team of nurses to clean the wards, set up a hospital kitchen and provided the wounded soldiers with quality care – bathing them, dressing their wounds and feeding them. Her intervention would later drastically reduce the number of soldiers dying from disease.

After creating a sane and healthy hospital environment, at night, when everyone was sleeping, Nightingale would visit the soldiers to make sure they were comfortable and carried a lantern with her on her night visits, this made the soldiers named her ‘The Lady with the Lamp’.

Her principles on hygiene in the early 19th century became the global standard for modern nursing from then till this present age. Before her death at the age of 90 in 1910, Nightingale became the first woman to receive the Order of Merit in 1907, an award given by the Queen of England for super-special work.

Hailing her legacy, Fiona Hibberts, from the Nightingale Nursing Academy said “The emphasis on sanitation, good hygiene, fresh air exercise, good food… no matter how much we advance, those fundamental foundational principles of Florence are still very much the basis of modern nursing.”