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Florence Nightingale Florence used her logical mind and society connections to save thousands of lives in the Crimean War.

In two parts

1854-1860
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Music: Sir Charles Villiers Stanford

© Allie Caulfield, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. Source

About this picture …

The Selimiye Barracks in Istanbul (then known as the Scutari barracks in Constantinople) acted as the base for the British Army during the Crimean War. It was here that Florence Nightingale reorganised the nursing and cleaned up the wards, doing the rounds late into the night and earning the famous tag, ‘the Lady of the Lamp’.

Florence Nightingale

Part 1 of 2

By the time she was twenty-one, well-to-do Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was sure that God wished her to exchange European society life for nursing. Her mother begged her to think again: her intellectual gifts and social position promised so much more. And in a way she was right.

AFTER reading distressing newspaper accounts of servicemen wounded in the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale, who at that time ran a women’s clinic in London, confided her frustrations to Sidney Herbert at the War Office.*

Herbert enthusiastically despatched Florence and thirty-eight nurses trained at her clinic to Constantinople. She arrived, days after the fateful charge of the Light Brigade on 25th October 1854, to find the hospital overwhelmed.

Well-travelled (she was born in Italy), well-connected and fluent in several languages, Florence was a godsend. She was attractive, her habitually sober expression breaking into an enchanting smile; but it was not a pretty face that the victims of gunshot or typhus needed. They needed someone to bring order, cleanliness and unblocked sewers to the choking, infected chaos.

Florence skilfully worked the press and her society contacts, lobbying the government into sending sanitation engineers and even prefabricated hospital buildings, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, out to the Dardanelles, drastically reducing the death-toll among the wounded.

Jump to Part 2

The Crimean War lasted from 1854 to 1856, and involved an alliance of Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire (based in Turkey) against the Russian Empire of the Tsars. It was bloody and difficult to justify, and the Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, resigned over it. See The Crimean War here on this site.

Précis

Florence Nightingale was a lady of high social position who dedicated her life to nursing, and was subsequently commissioned by the British to reform their military hospital in Constantinople during the Crimean War. She used her leverage in Westminster to make fundamental changes to the operation of the barracks hospital, saving thousands of lives. (54 / 60 words)

Part Two

© Wellcome Trust, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source

About this picture …

Florence Nightingale with Sir Harry Verney, Bt, soldier, MP for Buckinghamshire and Privy Councillor, a founder of the Royal Agriculural Society, and Florence’s brother-in-law.

FLORENCE watched the death-rate in her hospital in Constantinople drop from 42% to 2% in a few months, secured a pay rise for the soldiers, and organised their education.

But the strain broke her health. In 1856, she returned home, only to resume her campaign for better healthcare and rigorously trained nurses.

A public subscription, raised in gratitude for her work in the Crimea, allowed Florence to establish a nursing college at St Thomas’s Hospital in London.

She planned its curriculum down to the minutest detail, and the nurses she trained, and those trained in schools that adopted her innovative principles and exemplary discipline, were soon raising standards all over Britain and abroad.

The Order of Merit was awarded to Florence Nightingale in 1907 - the first woman to receive it - recognising her place as the founder of modern nursing.

Her social position, intelligence and upright character had not, as her mother once feared, been squandered on nursing. Nursing had revealed their purpose.

Copy Book

Précis

Following the Crimean War, Florence came back to Britain, and applied the same principles of order and hygiene she developed in Constantinople to her nursing college in London. From this grew the principles of modern nursing itself, of which she was recognised as the founder when she was awarded the Order of Merit in 1907. (54 / 60 words)

Suggested Music

1 2

Symphony No. 1 in B flat major (1876)

3: Andante Tranquillo

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924)

Performed by the Ulster Orchestra, conducted by Vernon Handley.

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Symphony No. 1 in B flat major (1876)

2: Scherzo - In Lander Tempo

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924)

Performed by the Ulster Orchestra, conducted by Vernon Handley.

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