Inspiring People

Florence Nightingale

Some of the qualities of Florence Nightingale were that she was generous, kind and believed in trusting people.

Florence Nightingale was born into a rich, upper-class British family in Florence and she was named after the city of her birth.

She was a very religious person and decided at a young age that she commit herself to nursing. Her parents were not very pleased about this. They wanted her become a wife and mother. In those days, nursing was a career with a poor reputation, filled mostly by poorer women. Nightingale announced her decision to enter nursing in 1845 bringing intense anger and distress to her family, particularly her mother.

She cared for poor people. In December 1844, in response to a pauper's death in a workhouse infirmary in London she became the leading person to fight for improved medical care in the infirmaries and immediately got the support of Charles Villiers, then president of the Poor Law Board.

Florence Nightingale is most famous for her contributions during the Crimean War. On 21 October 1854, she and a staff of 38 women volunteer nurses, trained by Nightingale were sent to Turkey, about 545 km across the Black Sea from Balaklava in the Crimea, where the main British camp was based.

Nightingale arrived in Turkey early in November 1854. She and her nurses found wounded soldiers being badly cared for by overworked medical staff. Medicines were in short supply and hygiene was being neglected. Florence and her colleagues began by thoroughly cleaning the hospital and equipment and reorganizing patient care.

During the Crimean campaign Florence Nightingale gained the nickname "The Lady with the Lamp", deriving from a phrase in a report in The Times newspaper. It said that; �She is a 'ministering angel' without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.�

Florence Nightingale returned to Britain a heroine on 7 August 1857, the most famous Victorian after Queen Victoria herself.

In 1883, Nightingale was awarded the Royal Red Cross by Queen Victoria. In 1907, she became the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit. In 1908, she was given the Honorary Freedom of the City of London. On 13 August 1910, at the age of 90, she died in her room at 10 South Street, Park Lane.