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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Florence Nightingale Biography NIGHTINGALE, Florence (1820–1910). An English hospital superintendent and reformer of nursing, born at Florence, Italy, May 12, 1820, the daughter of William Edward Nightingale, of Embley Park, Hampshire. Most of her childhood was spent in Staffordshire. Under the influence of her mother, a philanthropic woman, Miss Nightingale's attention was directed early to the condition of hospitals; she traveled extensively on the Continent to study such institutions and entered upon a course of training in nursing with the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul in Paris and at the Institute of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine. Her experience led her to plan to elevate nursing into a permanent and honorable occupation for women. In 1853 she became superintendent of a hospital for governesses in London. Upon the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 she set out for the front with 38 nurses. Nursing departments were organized by her at Scutari and later at Balaklava. By untiring energy and extraordinary ability in the face of almost incredible difficulties Miss Nightingale succeeded in alleviating the suffering of the sick and wounded. After the close of the war she gave a testimonial fund, which in 1860 amounted to £50,000, to the founding of the Nightingale Home at St. Thomas's Hospital for the training of nurses. During the Indian Mutiny, the American Civil War, and the Franco-Prussian War she was often consulted on questions concerning camp hospitals. She was an authority not only on military hospitals and nursing, but on nursing and sanitation in civil hospitals and in the home. Miss Nightingale received many honors from various governments and was the first woman upon whom the Order of Merit was conferred (1907). In 1915 a new statuary group for the Crimean Memorial, Waterloo Place, London, was unveiled. One of the figures is that of Florence Nightingale— "The Lady with the Lamp." Except for monuments to royal ladies, it was the first public statue of a woman in London. Miss Nightingale died in London, Aug. 13, 1910. She wrote: Notes on Hospitals (1859; 3d ed., 1863) ; Notes on Nursing (1860); Life or Death in India (1874); Notes on Nursing for the Laboring Classes (1876); Health Teaching in Towns and Villages (1894). Florence Nightingale to her Nurses: Selections from her Addresses appeared in 1914 (New York). The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XVII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 151-152. |