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Florence Nightingale
Columbia Encyclopedia entry: Nightingale, Florence
Nightingale, Florence, 1820–1910, English nurse, the founder of modern nursing, b. Florence, Italy. Her life was dedicated to the care of the sick and war wounded and to the promotion of her vision of an effective public health-care system. In 1844 she began to visit hospitals; in 1850 she spent some time with the nursing Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul in Alexandria; and a year later she studied at the institute for Protestant deaconesses in Kaiserswerth, Germany. In 1854 she organized a unit of 38 woman nurses for service in the Crimean War; by the end of the war she had become a legend. With the testimonial fund collected for her war services she established (1860) the Nightingale School and Home for training nurses at St. Thomas's Hospital, London. She was called The Lady with the Lamp because she believed that a nurse's care was never ceasing, night or day; she taught that nursing was a noble profession, and she made it so. Florence Nightingale was the first woman to be given the British Order of Merit (1907). She wrote Notes … on Hospital Administration (1857), Notes on Hospitals (1859), Notes on Nursing (1860), and Notes on Nursing for the Labouring Classes (1861). After her death the Crimean Monument, Waterloo Place, London, was erected (1915) in her honor, and the Florence Nightingale International Foundation was inaugurated (1934).

See biographies by C. Woodham-Smith (1950, 1983), E. Huxley (1975), B. M. Dossey (2000, repr. 2009), H. Small (2000), G. Gill (2004), and M. Bostridge (2008); M. Vicinus and B. Nergaard, ed., Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale: Selected Letters (1989); studies by F. B. Smith (1982), M. E. Baly (1986, repr. 1998), and S. Dengler (1988).

The Columbia Encyclopedia. Copyright © 2001-10 Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

Wikipedia search results for: Florence Nightingale
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Florence Nightingale, OM, RRC was a celebrated English nurse, writer and statistician. A Christian universalist, Nightingale believed that God had called her to be a nurse. She came to prominence for her pioneering work in nursing during the Crimean War, where she tended to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night. Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment, in 1860, of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London, the first secular nursing school in the world. The Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses was named in her honour, and the annual International...more »
Columbia Encyclopedia search results: Florence Nightingale
Results 1 - 4  of 4
  • Fliedner, Theodor

    Fliedner, Theodor, 1800–1864, German Protestant minister and philanthropist. In 1826 he organized the first prison society of Germany. Ten years later at Kaiserswerth he founded the pioneer de...

  • Üsküdar

    Üsküdar or Scutari, urban district, part of Istanbul, Turkey, on the Asian side of the Bosporus. It is a commercial and industrial center. Known as Chrysopolis in ancient times, it enjoyed its...

  • Crimean War

    Crimean War, 1853–56, war between Russia on the one hand and the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain, France, and Sardinia on the other. The causes of the conflict were inherent in the unsolved East...

  • nursing

    Nursing, science of providing continuous care for sick or infirm people. While nursing as an occupation has always existed, it is only in fairly recent years that it has developed as a special...

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