Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale was born in 1820. As a young woman, she felt God was calling her to do good work, and in 1851 she went to Germany for three months of nursing training that led to her becoming superintendent of a hospital for gentlewomen in London in 1853. That year, the Crimean War began, and newspapers described the desperate lack of proper medical facilities for wounded British soldiers at the front. The War Ministry asked Nightingale to oversee a team of nurses in the military hospitals, and in November 1854, she arrived in Turkey. With her nurses, she greatly improved the conditions and substantially reduced the mortality rate. When she returned to England, she established the Nightingale Training School for Nurses in London. Her trained nurses were sent to hospitals all over Britain, where they introduced new ideas and established nursing training on the Nightingale model. Nightingale's theories, published in Notes on Nursing (1860), were hugely influential, and her concerns for sanitation, military health, and hospital planning established practices still in existence today. She died in 1910.
