Florence Nightingale was born in 1820 to a wealthy English family in Florence, Italy (hence the name) and raised on a country estate in Hampshire. Against her family's wishes she trained as a nurse, then in October 1854, at thirty-four, took thirty-eight nurses to the British military hospital at Scutari in Constantinople in the middle of the Crimean War. The death rate at the hospital when she arrived was 42 percent of admissions; six months later, after she had reorganised sanitation, ventilation, and supplies, it was 2 percent. The newspapers turned her into 'the Lady with the Lamp.' Returning to England she founded the Nightingale School of Nursing at St Thomas' Hospital in 1860, the first secular nursing school in the world, and wrote the textbook Notes on Nursing that trained the first generation of professional nurses. She also became one of the world's first epidemiological statisticians: her 1858 'rose diagrams' showing that ten times as many British soldiers had died of preventable disease in the Crimea as of wounds is one of the foundational documents of evidence-based medicine. She died in her sleep in 1910 at ninety, having reformed military medicine across the British Empire.
All Figures
Nurse · Statistician · Founder of Modern Nursing
Florence Nightingale
1,820 CE – 1,910 CE
The Englishwoman who saved more soldiers in the Crimean War with statistics than the British Army did with rifles — and turned nursing into a profession.
Watch the 48s episodeLifetime
Date source not yet attached to this catalogue record.
Epoch Episode · ~48s
Epoch Episode · 6 scenes · ~48sEpoch+
