Florence Nightingale,
may be regarded as the true founder of nursing as a profession.
International Association for Nursing Ethics Return to ICNE Index
Florence Nightingale 1820 -1910
The middle-class English woman,
Florence Nightingale,
may be regarded as the true founder of nursing as a profession.
She took a team of nurses to Scutari (now Uskudar, Turkey) in 1854, into the Crimean War. By applying her scrupulous methods she reduced the hospital death rate from 42 percent to 2 percent.
In 1856 she founded the Nightingale School & Home for Nurses in London, UK.
Born in Florence, Italy she trained in Germany and France.
She wrote the now classic Notes on Nursing. She was awarded the UK's Order of Merit in 1907.
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Select Bibliography
Biographies
Allen, Donald ft., ‘Florence Nightingale: Towards a Psychohistorical Interpretation’, Journal of Inter-disciplinary History 6, i (Summer 1975), 23—45.
Cook, Sir Edward Tyas, The Life of Florence Nightingale, London: Macmillan, 1914.
Huxley, Elspeth, Florence Nightingale. New York: C. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975.
Smith, F. B., Florence Nightingale, Reputation and Power. London: Croom Helm, 1981.
Strachey, Lytton, Eminent Victorians. London: Chatto and Windus, 1918.
Woodham-Smith, Cecil Blanche, Florence Nightingale 1820—1910. London: Constable, 1950.
Letters
Vicinus, Martha, and Nergaard, Bea, eds., Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale. London: Virago, 1989.
Goldie, Sue M., 'I have done my duty’: Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War, 1854—56. Manchester University Press, 1987.
Texts
Calabria, Michael D., and Macrae, Janet A. (eds), Suggestions for Thought: selections and commentaries, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
Nightingale, Florence, Letters from Egypt. A. and G. A. Spottiswoode, 1854.
Nightingale, Florence, Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile, 1849—1850. Selected and with an introduction by Anthony Sattin. London: Weidenfcld and Nicholson, 1987.
Nightingale, Florence, Notes on Nursing; what it is and what it is not. New York: Dover Publications, 1969.
Nightingale, Florence, Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army. Harrison and Sons, 1858.
Hartill, R (intro), Florence Nightingale: Letters & Reflections (Visionary Women series), Arthur James Pubs, Evesham, UK, 1996.
Excerpt from Introduction:
"Florence Nightingale was a religious visionary, rebel and radical. She regarded Christ’s whole life as a war upon the restraints of the family; she was highly critical of the Church of England and what she saw as the lukewarm, hypocritical, unthinking religion of much of Victorian England; she was deeply aware of the failures of the church and the growing tide of atheism and indifferentism among working people, disillusioned with conventional religion. Yet her image as the ‘Lady of the Lamp’ became over the years sentimentalized and sanitized into a pillar of conventional Victorian respectability — a dream model of feminine gentleness, a woman soothing the fevered brow of men.
There are good reasons why she became such a heroine of the English imagination. She transformed the care of wounded and dying soldiers in the Crimean War and founded British modern nursing; she also pioneered modern statistics and the use of the graph, and reformed various aspects of hospital management and construction and British and Indian Army medical administration."