![]() ![]() She focused on improving hospital care for the poor and attempted, without success, to persuade the military to hire female nurses as the backbone of hospitals. Nightingale spent the remainder of her life working to better nursing education. The Nightingale school is considered the first modern school of nursing and its foundation marked the beginning of nursing as an organized profession. Stressing compassion and empathy, she insisted that the patient be treated as a whole person and not simply as a disease. While other training schools offered courses lasting only a few weeks or a few months, Nightingale enrolled students in a year-long program that included coursework on anatomy, surgical nursing, physiology, chemistry, food sanitation, ethics, and professionalism. She believed that the focus of a training school should be nursing education rather than nursing service. Thomas Hospital in London on June 24, 1860. Returning to Britain, Nightingale opened the Nightingale Home and Training School for Nurses at St. Afterwards, Nightingale was often referred to as "The Lady with the Lamp." As most deaths occurred at night, Nightingale made nighttime rounds carrying an oil lamp to illuminate her way. Within six months, the mortality rate among the wounded had dropped to two percent. When Nightingale arrived in the Crimea, the death rate at her hospital was fifty to sixty percent. They scrubbed the hospital, set up kitchens to provide balanced meals, put up screens to give the patients privacy, and set up recreational activities for recuperating soldiers. Assigned to a filthy, cholera-ridden, overcrowded hospital, Nightingale and the nurses under her command quickly established order. Nightingale traveled to the front with the permission of the secretary of war. When the Crimean War began in 1853, there were no organized nurses to care for wounded British soldiers. She studied nursing in a three-month course at the Institution of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth, Germany, and then traveled to Paris to study with the Sisters of Charity. Nightingale believed, however, that she had a calling from God to become a nurse. In the Victorian era, women of Nightingale's elite social class did not seek careers. Born on May 12, 1820, in Florence, Italy, to British parents on a European tour, Nightingale received the best education available for a young girl in the early nineteenth century. By the nineteenth century, nursing still lacked organization, professionalism, and standards of practice.įlorence Nightingale remedied this problem and structured nursing into a profession. In order to fill the nursing ranks, women were recruited from numerous sources, including the jails. When the Reformation during the sixteenth century closed Roman Catholic religious orders in England, few nuns were left to care for the sick. Later, nursing became a charitable occupation chiefly for nuns. Nursing originated as one of the maternal crafts, a service traditionally performed by women with little or no training who served from a sense of duty or kindness, and expected no compensation. Putnam's Sons, 1907–1912.Ībout the Author: Mary Adelaide Nutting (1858–1948) is chiefly remembered for her contributions to nursing education, including the establishment of the department of nursing at Teachers College, Columbia University, and her authorship of the four-volume A History of Nursing: The Evolution of Nursing Systems from the Earliest Times to the Foundation of the First English and American Training Schools for Nurses. Photograph in A History of Nursing: The Evolution of Nursing Systems from the Earliest Times to the Foundation of the First English and American Training Schools for Nurses, by Adelaide Nutting. Source: The Nightingale Home and Training School for Nurses, St. Thomas Hospitalįlorence Nightingale Organizes Modern Nursing Nightingale Home and Training School for Nurses, St.
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