Florence Nightingale was born on 12 May 1820 into a rich, upper class, well connected British family at the Villa Colombaia, in Florence, Italy.

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Florence Nightingale's most famous contribution came during the Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports got back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. On 21 October 1854, she and the staff of 38 women volunteer nurses that she trained were sent to the Ottoman Empire. They were deployed at Scutari, across the Black Sea from Balaklava in the Crimea, where the main British camp was based. Her team found that poor care for wounded soldiers was being delivered by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference. Medicines were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were common, many of them fatal. There was no equipment to process food for the patients.

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After Nightingale sent a plea to The Times for a government solution to the poor condition of the facilities, the British Government commissioned Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design a prefabricated hospital that could be built in England and shipped to the Dardanelles. The result was Renkioi Hospital, a civilian facility that, under the management of Dr. Edmund Alexander Parkes, had a death rate less than 1/10th that of Scutari.

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Nightingale reduced the death rate from 42% to 2%, either by making improvements in hygiene herself, or by calling for the Sanitary Commission. During her first winter at Scutari, 4,077 soldiers died there. Ten times more soldiers died from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. With overcrowding, defective sewers and lack of ventilation, the Sanitary Commission had to be sent out by the British government to Scutari in March 1855, almost six months after Florence Nightingale had arrived. The commission flushed out the sewers and improved ventilation. Death rates were sharply reduced, but she never claimed credit for helping to reduce the death rate.

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Nightingale still believed that the death rates were due to poor nutrition, lack of supplies, stale air and overworking of the soldiers. After she returned to Britain and began collecting evidence before the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, she came to believe that most of the soldiers at the hospital were killed by poor living conditions. This experience influenced her later career, when she advocated sanitary living conditions as of great importance. Consequently, she reduced peacetime deaths in the army and turned her attention to the sanitary design of hospitals and the introduction of sanitation in working class homes .

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In 1860, Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London. It was the first secular nursing school in the world, now part of King's College London. The Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses was named in her honour, and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday. Her social reforms include improving healthcare for all sections of British society, advocating better hunger relief in India, helping to abolish prostitution laws that were over-harsh to women, and expanding the acceptable forms of female participation in the workforce.

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Nightingale was a prodigious and versatile writer. In her lifetime, much of her published work was concerned with spreading medical knowledge. Some of her tracts were written in simple English so that they could easily be understood by those with poor literary skills. She also helped popularise the graphical presentation of statistical data. Much of her writing, including her extensive work on religion and mysticism, has only been published posthumously.

Photo: Wellcome Images • Licensed for reuse under CC BY 4.0

Portrait of Florence Nightingale on her return from the Crimea.

Florence Nightingale Statue,

London Road, Derby

Photo: Russ Hamer • Licensed for reuse under CC BY-SA 3.0

The Lady with the Lamp

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During the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale gained the nickname

"The Lady with the Lamp" from a phrase in a report in The Times:

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She is a 'ministering angel' without any exaggeration

in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides

quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face

softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence

and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little

lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.