Biography of Florence Nightingale

Biography of Florence Nightingale

The reputation of nursing in the early nineteenth century was very

bad. Most nurses were untrained and were paid less than factory

workers. They slept in the wards and part of their wages was paid in

gin which explains why most of the nurses were drunk. There was also

hardly any nurses whom the surgeons could trust to give the patients

their medicine. The hospitals in the 19th century were in a horrifying

state. The sick were lying on plank beds with chaff mattresses about

three inches thick between their weary bodies and the hard uneven

planks. The mentally ill shared wards with the normal sane patients.

The infants occupy was a dark stoned paved room, bare of furniture,

with no rug for the babies to crawl or lie upon and there was no

responsible people to see to their feeding and cleanliness. The sick

were nursed by old pauper women and a few younger women of the lowest

class possible, who had no training of any sort and only came to work

as a nurse because it is the last resort of female adversity. Runaway

wives, servants out of place, women bankrupt of fame and fortune ,

often relied upon nursing to fall back on. But maybe on a rare

occasion a respectable young woman takes to it from choice, but the

young respectable women who do take nursing from choice often her

friends would repudiate her.

Florence Nightingale was born in Florence , Italy in 1820 to a

middle-class family. She had a mother named Fanny, a sister called

Parthenope who was a year older then Florence, and lastly a dad.

Florence Nightingale was trained as a nurse at Kaiserwerth in Germany

and at Paris in 1851 to 1852. In 1852 s...

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... the country to set up

hospitals following Nightingales brilliant ideas and organization. By

1900, there were 64,000 trained nurses in Britain, where as in the 19th

century there were hardly any. Today a certain amount of all round

medical training is essential. There most probably wouldn't be if it

wasn't for Florence Nightingale.

Florence Nightingale was a well managed women who was very organized

and practical, but Nightingale had some weaknesses . Her ideas were

backwards in the field of medicine. She believed in miasma (an

infectious mist caused by a decaying substance mixed with air) and

didn't believe I the idea of contagionists (that a specific disease

was caused by a specific germ). Florence Nightingale was a determined

, energetic, organized woman who sadly died at 90 in 1910 after living

a heroic life.