Florence Nightingale Pioneer of Modern Nursing

Nursing is the duty that shares medicine in the path of humanity and helping the sick and the needy. It is the science and art of applying treatment, promoting health, and following up the stages of treatment for each patient. Without it, the medical health process would not be as it is now. It is an ethical practice that stems from people's need for love, kindness, and help in times of sickness and weakness.

Nurses work day and night in solidarity with doctors to raise the level of health care and achieve the optimal goal of treatment. This science has developed over time. It has become taught in universities, and institutes, colleges, and schools have been allocated to qualify many people to practice it. It has become an integral part of the health process and is closely linked to it. Without male and female nurses, hospitals would not be as they are now, and doctors would not be able to work alone in fighting epidemics, diseases, and wars.

This field has its founders and teachers, as is the case in every scientific and practical field. In this article, we will get to know the pioneer and founder of modern nursing science, Ms. Florence Nightingale, so follow us.

Life of Florence Nightingale:

Florence Nightingale was born in the Italian city of Florence in 1820 AD into a wealthy British family and from an upper social class. Her mother is called Frances Nightingale, and her father is William Nightingale. Her mother was from a family famous for trade and social relations with people of status. Although her mother has a social extroversion and loves communication and social climbing, Florence was different. She did not like to attract attention and felt shy when engaging in social situations. Florence Nightingale was known for her strong will and steadfastness, and she was always quarreling and stubborn with her very controlling mother, except that she was the same as all girls, trying to please her mother in all ways.

Her father, William Nightingale, was a wealthy man and heir to estates and lands. He had inherited land and estates in Derbyshire and Hampshire. Florence was brought up at the family home in Leahurst, Derbyshire, where she received a classical education as well as Italian, German, and French.

Florence Nightingale loved charitable volunteer work and was active in helping the poor, the needy, the sick, and the vulnerable in the villages within the vicinity of her father's property. After she was over the age of sixteen, she aspired to learn nursing, and it was a goal she referred to as her divine goal.

Florence Nightingale and Nursing:

Florence Nightingale returned to Britain, London city, in the 1850s to practice nursing. She worked at Middlesex hospital,and her work spoke for her. Also, her employer liked her and prompted her to a supervisor a year after she started there.

Florence Nightingale faced a cholera epidemic. This disease spread greatly and rapidly, and the number of injuries and deaths increased due to lack of hygiene and unsanitary conditions, which made her move towards raising awareness of the importance of hygiene and infection control and teaching and improving personal and public hygiene practices.

Florence Nightingale strived to achieve her goal and support the cause of nursing, so she financed and built St. Thomas Hospital and established within it the Nightingale Training School for Nurses. Thanks to Florence, nursing became a social value and was no longer despised by the upper classes. On the contrary, women of high social standing flocked to enroll in the Nightingale Training School for Nurses.

Nursing became the aspiration of many girls of that era, and nursing science began to gain its place among other sciences as an honorable science with high moral and social values. Florence Nightingale gained credit and fame, was honored, and poems and songs were created for her, as well as plays that showed her as the heroine of the nineteenth century.

During her stay in Scutari, Florence suffered from Crimean fever, from which she never fully recovered and she was homebound and bedridden at the age of 38, and would be so for the remainder of her life. However, Florence did not stop working towards her goal, rather she was fiercely determined and dedicated, and she devoted all her time and effort to trying to improve nursing and health care methods, and to work to alleviate the suffering of the wounded, the sick, and everyone in need.

Florence Nightingale conducted many interviews with politicians and dignitaries, and received many visitors while she was in her bed. In 1859, she circulated her observations on hospitals and focused on the nursing process and how to run hospitals in an accurate and correct manner, and focused on means of infection control, hand washing, and cleanliness.

She was consulted about the management and operation of field hospitals and the nursing of the wounded and sick in the United States of America at the outbreak of the Civil War, and served as an authority on public sanitation issues in India though she had never been there.

Florence Nightingale was conferred the merit of honor by King Edward in 1908 at the age of 88, and also received a congratulatory message on her 90th birthday in 1910 from King George.

Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War:

A fierce war broke out between an alliance that included the Ottoman Empire, the British Kingdom, France and Sardinia against the Russian Empire in 1853, and the reason for the war was the attempt of the allied kingdoms to return the catholic church to control and abolish the orthodox church.

The Crimean peninsula, which is located on the Black Sea, was the battlefield, and despite the strength of the coalition and its progress in the war, many diseases spread in line with a shortage of medicine, nursing and medical care, and then the secretary of war Herbert called Florence Nightingale to lend them a hand in this war.

Florence Nightingale gathered a number of volunteer nurses and they went to the Crimea, where the doctors and nurses presented a detailed report on the existing illnesses and injuries and told her about the lack of medicines, food and hygiene, and all these deficiencies led to many diseases and complications following injuries such as infections, gangrene and fever, in addition to other systemic diseases resulting from lack of food, medicine, and hygiene. As they counted the deaths, they found that the percentage of those who died on the battlefield from diseases that had nothing to do with injury or war was higher than those who died as a result of fighting and injuries. This is also likely to be due to the negligence of doctors and nurses and their failure to assume their duties properly as well.

Florence Nightingale's Environmental Theory:

During Florence Nightingale's work on developing nursing, establishing its foundations, and recording her own observations about it, she began to think about the role of the surrounding environment in improving the patient's psychological condition and accelerating the healing cycle through its contribution to strengthening biological and physiological processes.

Her theory revolved around the influence of the external factors surrounding the patient on the extent of their improvement, as the patient in her opinion, needs a clean atmosphere and air, sterile water, correct temperature, neither cold nor hot, healthy food and care for personal hygiene and sanitation, in addition to the patients getting an adequate amount of sunlight and ventilation of rooms, as natural light has a significant impact on the patient's ability to recover and treat.

Contributions of Florence Nightingale:

1. Sanitary Reform:

Florence Nightingale's actions led to a paradigm shift in healthcare. She reformed and developed many medical and nursing practices, monitored work methods in hospitals and care centers, and discovered that most deaths and spread of diseases are attributed to the incompetence of the medical and nursing staff, their negligence, lack of experience, and lack of labor in this field. Therefore, she worked to strengthen the controls related to the foundations and system of applying health care, hygiene, sterilization, and appropriate measures to manage cases and circulate them in hospitals. In addition to her assistance to the soldiers in the Crimean War, she established a statistical committee that studied death rates and the spread of diseases and their causes in cooperation with the ruling family. Queen Victoria also invited her to hold a discussion session on how to reform the military establishment in the United Kingdom.

2. Nightingale rose diagram:

In addition to the role of Florence Nightingale and her achievements in nursing and health, she was an expert in statistics and graphs, and mastered the pie chart that appeared in 1801 AD, and developed it, and it was named after the “Nightingale rose diagram”. Nightingale adopted this statistical method in hospitals when working on recording death statistics and their causes. As a result of this achievement, she was invited to join the Royal Statistical Society in 1859 AD.

3. The Feminist movement:

In that time period, women did not aim to obtain work, education, or ambition equal to men, and the ceiling of their ambitions was always marriage, having children, and a stable life. As for Florence Nightingale, she was an ambitious woman, and her father had a great role in supporting her through his belief in the importance of female education, and she became an activist who encourages and supports feminism and equality between men and women, and has written many articles emphasizing the social role of women and their importance in the development of society.

4. Theology:

Florence Nightingale has always been a faithful and religious person. Her love for nursing and working in it was considered by her as a divine destiny and message, and she saw that religion appears in dealing, caring, helping, and loving others. She worked on writing a religious book that bears in its pages her unconventional religious ideas, called “Suggestions for Thought”. Nightingale was also a woman who believed in a happy ending for all, as she believed that everyone who dies deserves eternal salvation, which is represented in Paradise without reckoning.

In conclusion:

In this article, we have been introduced to Ms. Florence Nightingale, her life, her role in the development of nursing science, her assistance in the Crimean War and hospitals, as well as her environmental theory and her other contributions on several levels.