Florence Nightingale
1820 – 1910 · United Kingdom
Known for: British reformer and statistician who founded modern professional nursing
“F.N. Born 1820. Died 1910.”
Biography
Florence Nightingale was born on 12 May 1820 at the Villa Colombaia near Florence, while her wealthy English parents were travelling in Italy, and was named for the city of her birth. Her father, William Edward Nightingale, held unusually progressive views on the education of daughters and taught her himself: French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek, mathematics, history, composition and literature. In February 1837, at sixteen, she experienced what she described as a call from God to service, though years passed before that calling took the shape of nursing. Her mother and her sister Parthenope resisted fiercely, and she declined a nine year courtship from the politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, certain that marriage would foreclose the work she meant to do.
Her opportunity came with the Crimean War, when her friend Sidney Herbert, then Secretary at War, arranged for her to lead a party of nurses to the military hospitals at Constantinople. There she organised the care of wounded soldiers and pressed relentlessly for cleanliness, ventilation, decent food and reliable supply, measures that cut mortality sharply and made her a figure of national feeling as the Lady with the Lamp on her night rounds. Less visible at the time, but more consequential, was her command of numbers: she gathered mortality data on a scale rarely attempted and presented it in graphical form, including the polar area diagram still known as the Nightingale rose. In 1860 she founded a nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London, the first secular school of its kind, and wrote prolifically on health and hygiene, some tracts deliberately in plain language for readers of limited literacy.
Much of her later life was spent in ill health and largely indoors, working through correspondence and reports on army sanitation, hospital design, famine relief in India and the expansion of paid work open to women. She died on 13 August 1910, aged ninety. Her school survives within King's College London, her name marks the international medal awarded to nurses, and International Nurses Day falls each year on her birthday.