(Institution Name)
Florence Nightingale
The modern day nursing owes thanks and pays tribute to Florence Nightingale, who was a nurse and a statistician by profession. She is acknowledged as the founder of the modern day nursing and her work and contributions to the field are studied across the world in all the countries as part of the graduate syllabus.
She was born in 1820 and died in 1910. Born in England, she was very fond of making a difference in the society through her efforts and though she could have opted for any career at that time in any part of the world based on her expertise in the subject of statistics, she opted to stay in the country serving as a nurse (Bostridge, 2015).
The most prominent social event that had unfolded during her tenure as a nurse was the Crimean war that involved several English soldiers death and injuries. She was the manager nurse at the facility where these soldiers were brought to recover from their wounds.
Those days were very horrific as the whole country was in the state of unrest and it was considered unsafe for people to travel alone at day, let alone at night. Apart from that, in her profession, the psychological effect of war that she could witness at all times in the form of badly wounded soldiers was terrible.
Despite this, she used to roam around the galleries where the soldiers were kept in injured form at night with no protection and just a lamp in her hand. This was a gesture of care and fearlessness that was acknowledged by the people and she was titled “the lady with the lamp” (Cohen, 1984).
In those times, she was very young, and the nation needed a hero that she provided. She quickly became a known figure that was very much adored by the public and even motivated the people to join in the fight with their soldiers in any capacity that they could. It was however speculated in the recent past that her services during the war were exaggerated to motivate the people of England to come for help.
However, there is clear evidence that she was of great help in the older days of war. She opened an institute where she aimed to teach women what are considered the modern day nursing methods. She opened this school in St Thomas hospital in London that is also rendered to be the first secular nursing school to have ever been built in the world. This school was established in 1860. (Bostridge, 2015)
Another contribution that she made in the field of nursing came in the form of her publications. She was a very good writer, and she worked hard to spread the word about medical sciences and nursing knowledge. Unlike most other writers in those times who were more concerned with keeping their writing specified to only the knowledgeable and literate readers, she was known to write in a manner that was very easy for everyone to understand, even the people who had poor literacy skills.
It can be safely said that her writing was directed to serve as a knowledge base for the less educated so that they could make a career in nursing and to come in handy in the need of the hour. Because she was a statistician, she could illustrate her meaning in the form of graphs and charts bearing statistical data, hence making her knowledge contribution better.
Although she could not live to see the fruit of her contributions, not long after she had died, there occurred world war one that flat lined the infrastructure of England involving a tremendous amount of loss of life and limb. In the world wars one and two, the role of nurses was admirable, and the primary knowledge base for these nurses was the work of Florence Nightingale (Calabria & Macrae, 2013).
The biggest contribution that is associated with the personality is the fact that she had transformed nursing into a profession. At the time of her occupation, nursing was not recognized as a specialized profession and was rendered as a makeshift arrangement for doctors (Pfettscher, de Graff, Marriner Tomey, Mossman & Slebodnik, 2002).
The supposed purpose of nurses was to ensure that the shortage of doctors could be fulfilled and that the patients could be given injections and medicines as well as first aid if the doctors were not available.
Several patients who were injured and were under treatment in the hospitals used to die at night when they were unsupervised. This was realized by Nightingale as an administrative issue that the injured people were vulnerable to falling unconscious quickly and dying all of a sudden without showing any signs of trouble earlier on. (Pfettscher, de Graff, Marriner Tomey, Mossman & Slebodnik, 2002).
Therefore, she took the initiative of checking on the patients in critical condition at night in order to respond to medical complexities to these patients at the time of night. In order to pay homage to the services that Nightingale provided to the society, there are several hospitals in the world that have been named after her.
Her literature that has been added to the body of knowledge by Nightingale serves as a source of information for first aid technicians and as a syllabus on all the levels of education in nursing from college to higher studies as the most credible and preferred stock of knowledge. (Pfettscher, de Graff, Marriner Tomey, Mossman & Slebodnik, 2002).
References
Bostridge, M. (2015). Florence Nightingale: The woman and her legend. Penguin UK.
Calabria, M. D., & Macrae, J. A. (Eds.). (2013). Suggestions for thought by Florence Nightingale: Selections and commentaries. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Cohen, I. B. (1984). Florence nightingale. Scientific American, 250(3), 128-137.
Pfettscher, S. A., de Graff, K., Marriner Tomey, A., Mossman, C., & Slebodnik, M. (2002). Florence nightingale: Modern nursing. Nursing theorists and their work, 65-83.
