Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale (May 12th, 1820 - August 13rd, 1910), called The Lady off the Lamp , was a pionnière of the Soins modern male nurses and a notable statistician. She off accepted the Order Merit and Royal Red Cross.

First years

Florence Nightingale was born in a British family from middle-class, spendthrift and to the relations placed high, the Colombaia Villa in Florence to Italy. One gave him the name of his birthplace. His/her father was William Edward Nightingale, born Shore (1794-1875). In agreement with the will of Peter Nightingale, the uncle of his mother Mary, it had not only inherited the grounds this last, Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, but also taken the name and the weapons of Nightingale. His/her mother was Frances Fanny Nightingale, born Smith (1789-1880). The father of the latter was the free trade William Smith.

Inspired by what she regarded as a divine Christian call, which she for the first time in 1837 in Embley Park then throughout its life, Florence Nightingale felt decided to devote itself to the trade of nurse. This choice showed at the same time its passion and its rejection of the awaited role of a woman of its statute, which was to become wife and mother. Indeed, the career of nurse had at that time a bad reputation, the stations being mainly occupied by relatively poor women, perceived like " parasites" according to the armies. In practice, these nurses could just as easily work like cookers. Thus, when Nightingale decided into 1845 to undertake a training of nurse, it caused at its family a great anger and a great distress, in particular in her mother.

Nightingale dealt of the poor and the poor ones. In December 1844, in reaction to died of the one of them in the infirmary of a Workhouse, event which made scandal then, it became the militant principal one of the improvement of the medical care in the infirmaries and attracted itself immediately the support of Charles Villiers, then president of Poor Law Board. This led it to take an active part in the reform of the Poor Laws, which went well beyond the medical care. She played thereafter a decisive part of mentor at Agnes Elizabeth Jones and other nurses in formation before sending them to Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary.

In 1846, she visited Kaiserswerth in Germany, and learned some more on its hospital pioneer established by Theodor Fliedner and managed by an order of sisters Lutherans (deaconess). She was deeply impressed by the quality of the care like by the devotion and the practices of the sisters.

Nightingale was courted by the politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, but rejected this last, convinced that a marriage would put in danger its capacity to continue its vocation of nurse. In Rome in 1847, recovering from a depression caused by the perpetual crisis that its relation with Milnes represented, it met Sidney Herbert, a brilliant politician which had been Secrétaire with the War of 1845 to 1846, station which he again occupied at the time of the Crimean War. Herbert was already married, but him and Nightingale tested a reciprocal attraction immediately and remained very close throughout their life. Herbert played a decisive part in the facilitation of the actions pionnières of Nightingale in the Crimea in the field of the care male nurses, and it became for him an essential adviser at the time of her political career. In 1851, it disallowed the proposal for a marriage of Milnes against the wishes of her mother.

Nightingale also maintained the strong and close relations with Benjamin Jowett, in particular about the time when it planned to bequeath money in its will in order to establish a pulpit of stastistic applied to the Université of Oxford.

Nightingale began its career of nurse in 1851, when it obtained a four months formation in Germany as a sister of Kaiserswerth. She undertook the formation in spite of the sharp objections of her family concerning the risks and the social implications of such an activity, and the origins roman catholics of the hospital. During its stay with Kaiserwerth, it paid to have tested most important and intense experiment of its divine call.

August 22nd, 1853, Nightingale off took a station of surintendante in Institute for the Care Sick Gentlewomen (Institute for the Care of the Sick Women) in Upper Harley Street in London, position which it preserved until October 1854. His/her father placed at his disposal an annual sum of 500 pounds, which enabled him to live comfortably while continuing its career. James Joseph Sylvester was his mentor.

Crimean War

The most famous contribution of Nightingale occurred at the time of the Crimean War, which became its center of attention when reports/ratios started to reach Great Britain about the terrible conditions of the casualties. October 21st, 1854, Nightingale and a group of 38 voluntary nurses trained by itself and including his/her aunt Mai Smith, were sent (under the authorization of Sidney Herbert) in Turkey, with approximately 545 kilometers of Balaclava in the Crimea, other with dimensions of the Black Sea, where was based the British camp.

Nightingale arrived at the beginning of November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks at Scutari (today Üsküdar in Istanbul). The nurses found soldiers wounded neglected by a medical personnel overflowed vis-a-vis the indifference of the officers. The reserves of drugs were limited, neglected hygiene, and the current infections of mass, the majority of them being fatal. There was also no equipment to prepare the food of the patients.

Nightingale and its compatriots started with completely cleaning the hospital and the equipment, and by reorganizing the care of the patients. However, during its stay with Scutari, death rate did not decrease; on the contrary, it started to increase. The number of deaths exceeded that of all the other hospitals of the area. During its first winter with Scutari, 4077 soldiers found death there. Ten times more soldiers died of diseases such as the Typhus, the Typhoid fever, the Choléra and the Dysenterie that wounds of combat. The conditions reigning with the temporary military hospital was fatal to the patients because of the excess, defective sewers and a lack of ventilation. In March 1855, the gouvenement British one had to send a medical commission to Scutari, nearly six months after the arrival of Nightingale. The sewers were cleaned and improved ventilation, and death rate decreased quickly.

Nightingale continued to think that death rate was with the mediocrity of the food and reserves, like of the overwork of the soldiers. It is only after its return in Great Britain and to have gathered information near the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army which it started to think that the death of the majority of the hospitalized soldiers was due to the bad living conditions. This experiment influenced its career, and thereafter it defended the importance of the medical living conditions. It thus contributed to reduce the number of dead within the army in times of peace and directed its attention towards the medical design of the hospitals.

Return to the country

Nightingale was accommodated out of heroin on its return in Great Britain on August 7th, 1857. According to BBC, it was obviously the most famous victorienne after the Reine Victoria itself. She moved residence of her family with Middle Claydon, in Buckinghamshire, to settle in Burlington Hotel in Piccadilly. She was struck of fever, probably due to a chronic form of brucellosis (fever criméenne), which she contracted at the time of the Crimean War, possibly combined with a Syndrome of chronic tiredness. She prohibits with her mother and with his/her sister to enter her room and left it only seldom.

In answer to an invitation of the Victoria Queen, and in spite of the constraints imposed by its containment in its room, Nightingale played a central role in the establishment of the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, whose Sidney Herbert became president. As a woman, it could not be named at the Commission, but wrote the report/ratio of more than thousand pages of the latter including of the detailed statistical reports/ratios, and played a decisive part in the application of its recommendations. The Commission Report led to a major revision of the care exempted to the soldiers, and with the establishment of a school of army medical officers and a vast system of medical files of the army.

Later career

Whereas Nightingale was still in Turkey, a public meeting, organized on November 29th, 1855 and aiming at making recognize the work which it had carried out during the war, led to the establishment of Nightingale Fund for the training of the nurses. The generous donations flowed. Sidney Herbert was named honorary secretary, and the Duke of Cambridge chair funds. Nightingale was also regarded as a pionnière of the concept of medical tourism, as its letters of 1856 addressed to Turkish thermal spas indicate it, in which it specifies the conditions of health, physical descriptions, food modes and other details vital of the patients which it directed towards these stations, much cheaper than those that one could find in Switzerland. It directed patients obviously having few average worms accessible treatments.

In 1859, Nightingale Fund placed at its disposal the sum of 45.000 books, with which it created Nightingale Training School with St Thomas' Hospital on July 9th, 1860. The school is called today Florence Nightingale School off Nursing and Midwifery (school of nurses and midwives) and belonged to King' S College London. The first trained nurses started to work on May 16th in Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary. Nigthingale also made countryside and raised funds for Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital in Aylesbury, close to the residence of its family.

Nightingale wrote to Notes one Nursing , one little book of 136 pages published in 1860 and being used as stone of angle with the program of Nightingale School and other schools which were founded. The book was also a success near the general public and is regarded as a traditional text of introduction to the care male nurses. Nightingale passed the remainder of its life to encourage the establishment and the development of the occupation of nurse and to make it evolve to its modern form.

Work of Nightingale inspired the nurses of the American Civil War. The northerner government called upon its councils to organize the medical care exempted on the ground. Although its ideas met resistance on behalf of the officers, they inspired the body of volunteers of United States Sanitary Commission.

In 1869, Nightingale and Elizabeth Blackwell ouvrèrent Women' S Medical College.

In the years 1870, Nightingale was the mentor of Linda Richards, " the first trained nurse of Amérique" , and allowed him to go back to the United States with a formation and knowledge allowing him to found schools of nurses of quality. Linda Richards continued in this way and became a large pionnière of the care nurses in the United States and Japan.

In 1882, the nurses of Nightingale had a position of influence growing within the incipient profession. A certain number of them had become nurses as a chief in several notable hospitals, of which St Mary' S Hospital, Westminster Hospital and St Marylebone Workhouse Infirmary in London, as well as Hospital for Incurables in Putney. One can also quote, through Great Britain, Royal Victoria Hospital de Netley, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, Cumberland Infirmary, and Liverpool Royal Infirmary, and also Sydney Hospital in New South Wales in Australia.

In 1883, Nightingale was decorated with Royal Red Cross by the Victoria Queen. In 1907, it became the first woman with being decorated with Order off Merit. In 1908, one decreed Honorary Freedom off to him the City off London.

In 1896, Nightingale was found confined to bed. It is possible that she was victim of the chronic Syndrome of tiredness and the International CFS Awareness Day (International Day of Prevention against the SFC) is today celebrated the day of its birthday. During these years of confinement, it completed work pioneers in the field of the management of the hospitals, work which was propagated quickly through England and the rest of the world.

She died on August 13rd, 1910. Its close relations refused the proposal for a burial in Westminster Abbey, and it is buried today with the cemetery of St Margaret Church in East Wellow in Hampshire.

Contribution to the statistics

As of its more young age, Nightingale appeared particularly gifted for mathematics and excelled there thanks to the lesson of his/her father. It was interested in particular in the statistical , a field in which his/her father, one of the pioneers of the epidemiology, was an expert. It thus frequently had recourse to the statistical analyzes in its compilations, analyzes and presentations of data on the medical care and the public health.

Nightingale was a pionnière of the soft copy of information. It used inter alia pie-charts, developed by William Playfair in 1801. After the Crimean War, it started to use a version improved of these diagrams (being equivalent to the Histogramme S circulars of today), in order to illustrate the seasonal causes of mortality of the patients of the military hospital which it managed. Nightingale called " coxcomb" (Crete of cock) a compilation of such diagrams, but thereafter the term was often employed to indicate an individual diagram. It frequently used the coxcombs to present reports/ratios on the nature and the extent of the conditions of the medical care during the Crimean War to the members of the Parliament and to the civils servant, who could probably not have read or include/understand traditional statistical reports/ratios.

Thereafter, Nightingale carried out a complete statistical study of the medical system in the Indian campaigns and was the major figure of the improvement of the medical care and the public services of health in India.

In 1858, it was the first woman with being elected member of Royal Statistical Society, and became thereafter honorary member of American Statistical Association.

Contribution to the literature and the feminist movement

Although better known for its contributions to the médicine and mathematics, Nightingale is also an important character of the Féminisme English. Between 1850 and 1852, she fought to be defined itself and against waitings of her family to see it marrying with a man of the high society. In order to put in order its thoughts, it wrote Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth (Suggestions of ideas addressed to the people in search of religious truth). This book in three volumes printed forever in entirety, but one of the parts, entitled Cassandra , was published by Ray Strachey in 1928, which includes it in The Cause , a text reporting the history of the feminist movement.

Cassandra is a protest against the excessive feminization of the women, which makes them practically unable to only manage. Thus Nightingale considered the lethargic lifestyle of his/her mother and her sister, in spite of their education. The text reflects also its fear to see its ideas proving to be ineffective, like those of Cassandra. Cassandra was a virgin-priestess of Apollon which accepted a prophecy inspired by the gods, but its prophetic warnings were ignored. Elaine Showalter qualified Cassandra " major text of English feminism, a bond between Wollstonecraft and Woolf."

Heritage and memory

The outstanding contribution of Nightingale was its role in the establishment of the modern profession of nurse. She showed with all the nurses a remarkable example of compassion, devotion to the care of the patients, and of conscientious and attentive administration of the hospitals.

The work of Nightingale School off Nursing continues today. A museum is dedicated to him to London, the Florence Nightingale Museum, and another with it and its family, Claydon House. One of the buildings of the school of nurses and midwives of the University of Southampton also bears its name. Lastly, the International Day of the Nurses is celebrated the day of its birthday each year.

The Florence Nightingale Declaration, a campaign launched on a worldwide scale by figures of the world male nurse through Nightingale Initiative for Total Health (NIGH), aims at creating a world popular movement in order to submit to the General meeting of the United Nations of 2008 two resolutions declaring: the International Day of the Nurses 2010 (the centenary of died of Nightingale) and The ONE Decade for has Healthy World (Decade of the United Nations for a World in Good health) of 2011 to 2020 (the bicentenary of the birth of Nightingale). The NIGH also works to renew the awakening of the topics raised by Nightingale, such as the Preventive medicine and holistic health.

Several churches of the Communion Anglican commemorate Nightingale by one feastday on their liturgical calendars. It is also the case of Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which celebrates Nightingale like renovating company at the sides of Clara Maass on August 13rd.

The airline company KLM baptized Florence Nightingale one of its airliners MD-11.

Three hospitals of Istanbul bear the name of Nightingale: the F.N. Hastanesi with Sisli (the largest private hospital of Turkey), Metropolitan F.N. Hastanesi with Gayrettepe, and Avrupa F.N. Hastanesi with Mecidiyeköy, all three pertaining to Turkish Cardiology Foundation.

During the War of Vietnam, Nightingale inspired by many male nurses of the United States Army, causing an renewed interest for its life and its work. Among his admirors, one can quote Country Joe McDonald, which carried out an exhaustive Web site in its honor.

Agostino Gemelli Medical Center in Rome, the first university hospital of Italy and one of its most respected medical centres, honoured the contribution with Nightingale to the occupation of nurse by giving the name " Bedside Florence" with a computing system without wire which it developed to assist the care male nurses.

Nigthingale Corona, an oval relief of form on the surface of Venus, bears its name.

There exist many foundations bearing the name of Florence Nightingale. The majority are related to the care male nurses, but there exists also Nightingale Research Foundation in Canada, dedicated to the study and the treatment of the chronic Syndrome of tiredness, which one supposes that Nightingale was victim.

There exists a psychological effect called Florence Nightingale Effect where the nurses and doctors fall in love with their patients.

The United States Air Force maintains a fleet 20 McDonnell Douglas C-9A " Nightingale" , of the air medical escape apparatus.

The tower located more at north of Selimiye Barracks is a museum today, and in several of its parts, the relics and reproductions related to Florence Nightingale and her nurses are in exposure.

A bronze plate, attached to the base of Crimean Memorial in Haydarpasa Cemetery, to Istanbul, inaugurated in 1954 the day of the Day Empire to celebrate the hundredth birthday of its services of nurse rendered to the area, carries the following inscription:

" In Florence Nightingale, of which work completed one century ago close to this cemetery made it possible to alleviate much suffering human and established the foundations of the profession of infirmière."

Others

At the beginning of its stay in Turkey, Nightingale was accustomed to travelling to horse to make its inspections. It used then a cart drawn by an ass and one reported that it escaped serious wounds when the cart was reversed in an accident. Following this episode, it used a solid horse-drawn carriage of Russian construction, equipped with an impermeable roof and curtains. The car was transported to England after the war then given to Nightingale Training School for Nurses, that Nightingale founded with St Thomas Hospital. It was damaged when the hospital was bombarded by the Blitz. Thereafter, it was restored then transferred to Army Museum with Aldershot.
the voice of Florence Nightingale was preserved for the posterity thanks to a recording for gramophone of 1890.
Florence Nightingale proved that 90% of the patients of the hospitals of London found death against only 60% for the patients not going to the hospital.
the older sister of Nightingale, Parthenope, was also named according to its birthplace. Parthenope was a Greek colony which is part from now on of the town of Naples.
Nightingale always carried a bracelet made starting from the hair of its family.
In the episode The Junior Mint of the American series Seinfeld, George mixes Nightingale with Clara Barton by calling it " Clara Nightingale".
According to the censuses carried out in England and with the Country of Galle, the addresses of his residence were the following ones: East Wellow Hampshire in 1841, Burlington Hotel, Westminster St James, Middlesex in 1851 and 1861, St George Hanover Public garden, London, in 1881,1891 and 1901.
Its death certificate is indexed in the following way: " Deaths Sep 1910 NIGHTINGALE Florence - old 90 registrar St.Geo.H.Sq".
In the televised series Star Trek To travel, the ensign Harry Kim gives her name to a medical vessel alien.
Since 1907, the Red Cross decrees the medal Florence Nightingale with the people being characterized by their actions in the field from the care male nurses.

Works

Una and Her Paupers, Memorials off Agnes Elizabeth Jones with an introduction of Florence Nightingale, Diggory Close, ISBN 978-1905363223.

References

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