Florence Nightingale was named the 'lady with the lamp' by the solders that she nursed during that war. Whilst there have been films made about her life which romanticised this part of her life the films tend to miss out on the more major role that she played both in health and in nursing.
Florence was the first nurse to look for evidence that something worked or didn't work. She didn't always know or understand why one thing worked and another didn't but if the evidence demonstrated that it worked she wrote it all down and took action to implement it. Today we still move immobile patients every two hours to prevent pressure sores.
She also observed surgeons and noted which of their patients developed infections the most often and which did not. It was through her observation that hand washing was initially demonstrated as being a way to prevent the spread of infection. Of course it would take years for it to really be enforced but her nurses were taught how to wash their hands properly and she encouraged the doctors to do the same.
She was also a rather dramatic and emotional person who spent many hours on a chaise long in the family home fretting about the state of the health in hospitals, trying to improve the nursing care of patients in hospitals and setting up a nursing school.
Until Florence came along most nurses were either religious sisters or alcoholic ex-prostitutes working in very poor hospitals and asylums. Young ladies and women from middle and upper class backgrounds did not have any profession, although they did do charitable works. Florence Nightingale turned nursing into a reputable profession and had very strict rules that included nursing students having to go out in groups of 3 or more so that there could be 'no improprietory'.
Today nursing students are taught to use theory and practise based on solid evidence and it is also far more person-centred than it used to be. As late as the 1980s nurses were still using practises that had not been researched and proved successful through thorough testing. Sometimes it worked because of something else we were doing at the same time.
We will never know what Florence would think of today's nurses. I don't think that she would have approved of them wearing trousers, tattoos or body and facial piercings as she was quite a traditionalist about that sort of thing. The book about her life is a biography and not an autobiography so we will probably never know for sure. What we do know is those 6 months in the Crimea were the only nursing that she ever did.
Sarah
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