The Lady of the Lamp
Probably one of the most famous people in the medical profession is the English nurse Florence Nightingale. Florence was born into a wealthy family in 1820, and as she grew up, she developed an interest in helping others. By the age of seventeen, she had decided that she wanted to become a nurse. T first, her parents would not let her, because they believed it was not a suitable profession for a woman. It was until Florence was 31 that her father eventually gave his permission, and she was able to go to Germany to train as a nurse.
By 1853, Florence was running a women’s hospital in London. However, her services were soon needed abroad because of the Crimean War, which started in 1854. She travelled to Scutari in Turkey to help the wounded soldiers, and she was horrified by the hospital conditions she found there. Many of the injured men hadn’t washed for weeks, and they were sleeping in dirty, overcrowded rooms. Disease spread quickly in these conditions, so many of the patients died. At that time, only one in six patient deaths was due to actual wounds; other deaths were due to infections and disease.
Florence and her nurses soon went about changing the situation. They set up a kitchen to provide better food for the patients and a laundry to wash their clothes. Florence also reported the conditions to the War Office back home, and forced them to carry out important sanitary reforms in the military hospitals. In February 1855, the death rate of patients was 42%; by June 1855, it had fallen to 2%.
Florence gradually became known by her patients as ‘the Lady of the Lamp’, because she was the only woman to beallowed in the hospital after eight o’clock at night, so the soldiers became used to seeing her holding a lantern. She hardly slept, and she was on her feet for twenty hours a day. The wounded men loved and respected her, and she was seen as a hero back home in England.
However, it was not a fame that Florence wanted, and when the war finished in1856, she returned to England in secret. She wrote a book called Notes on Nursing, and met Queen Victoria to discuss the future of nursing. The Nightingale School and Home for Nurses opened in1860, and five years later the first trained Nightingale nurses started work. Florence passed away peacefully in her sleep in her own house on 13th August, 1910, at the age of 90.