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Florence Nightingale Happy Birthday To The Founder Of Nursing
Today is the birthday of Florence Nightingale, the woman credited with founding modern nursing, the reformation of the hospital system and the mathematician.
Florence Nightingale was a pioneer in her time. Women of her upper economic class did not generally attend university nor embark on professional careers.
Her father believed women should be educated, so his daughters learned Italian, Latin, Greek, history, and mathematics. Florence in particular received excellent early preparation in mathematics from her father and aunt. Later she was also tutored in mathematics.
Florence Nightingale is acknowledged for her work in the Crimean War. It is there she conducted statistical research later used for reform of the British military health-care system. While caring for the wounded and dying she noted, by utilizing techniques of statistical analysis, the incidence of preventable deaths in the military. She made the connection between sanitary conditions and healing, an association that became an established standard.
Her insistence on adequate lighting, diet, hygiene, and activity shows she understood the mind and body work together. She promoted cleanliness, a predecessor to the clean and sterile techniques of today. In doing so Nightingale gave proof sanitary conditions are a major barrier to infection, which is also condusive to healing.
During the American Civil War, Florence Nightingale was called upon by the Union government as a consultant in organizing field medicine. Despite being a published author, and a well known expert for her work in nursing in combat conditions, her suggestions to the government officials were met with resistance. Once again Nightingale’s work inspired the creation of a volunteer group, the United States Sanitary Commission which became an official agency of the government through legislation signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1861.
Florence Nighingale is renown for her two crowning achievements –establishing nursing as a highly respected profession, not an easy task in the Victorian era; and hospital reform a no less daunting project at the time. Nighingale is also the inventor of the polar-area diagram which she used to prove social phenomena could be measured objectively and subjected to mathematical analysis. Nightingale, the Lady with the Lamp, is hailed as an innovator in the collection, tabulation, interpretation, and graphical display of descriptive statistics as well as her contributions to healthcare and the field of nursing.
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