Part 1 of 2
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.
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
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.
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)