Character/Quality Comics

Florence Nightingale

Non-Fiction

Florence Nightingale was an English social reformer, statistician and the founder of modern nursing. Born in Florence, Italy in 1820 to a wealthy British family, Florence Nightingale was named after the city of her birth, and inherited a liberal-humanitarian outlook from both sides of her family. Florence was educated by her father in history, mathematics, Italian, classical literature, and philosophy. Florence was the more academic of she and her sister, and showed an early ability for the collection and analysis of data, which would be of great use to her later in her life. Nightingale went through the first of several experiences she saw as calls from God in February 1837, while at Embley Park, prompting her to devote her life to the service of others. As a young woman, Nightingale was described as attractive, slender, and graceful. While she was often severe in manner, she was said to be charming and to possess a radiant smile. She had some relationships during her youth, but did not marry because she thought it would interfere with her calling to help others. Nightingale traveled the world, and arrived at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari (modern-day Üsküdar, Istanbul), Constantinople in 1854. The medical staff there, consisting mainly of volunteer nurses, was sorely overworked and the conditions for the patients were horrible. More soldiers were dying from infections and illnesses in the hospitals than from the battle wounds with which they came in. Nightingale sent reports back to Britain pleading for aid and famously focused her efforts to improve the medical situation in Constantinople during the Crimean War. It is alleged that she reduced the death rate from 42% to 2%, either by making improvements in hygiene herself, or by calling for the Sanitary Commission. She never claimed credit for helping to reduce the death rate. Nightingale still believed that the death rates were due to poor nutrition, lack of supplies, stale air, and overworking of the soldiers. There have been documentaries released in the 2000s by BBC, critical of Nightingale's performance in the Crimean War, and those criticisms have been contested by Nightingale scholars who claim that the primary sources do not support such changes to the history. During the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale earned the nickname, "The Lady with the Lamp" because of Times article which spoke of her as a "ministering angel" who walked the corridors with a lamp, and later via the reference in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1857 poem "Santa Filomena." In 1855, the Crimea began the Nightingale Fund to train nurses in honor of Nightingale's work during the war and in 1859 she wrote the core text for the Fund's training school, "Notes on Nursing." One of Nightingale's signal achievements was the introduction of trained nurses into the workhouse system in Britain from the 1860s onwards, so that poor sick people were able to be taken care of by trained nurses rather than other poor people with no medical expertise. After the war in Crimea, Nightingale's work in England was equally transformative; her social connections, knowledge, and persistence were key in effecting real change in what was a largely inefficient and ineffective medical system. In 1883, Nightingale became the first recipient of the Royal Red Cross. In 1904, she was appointed a Lady of Grace of the Order of St John (LGStJ). In 1907, she became the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit. In the following year she was given the Honorary Freedom of the City of London. Her birthday is now celebrated as International CFS Awareness Day. Florence Nightingale died in her sleep at the age of 90 in London.