FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

The nineteenth century in Europe is distinguished by the awakening of social consciousness in the souls of Europeans; for in the wake of the spread of the principles of the French Revolution — the principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality — and the declaration of the rights of man, the sons of a single homeland began to feel that they were brothers, with no difference in rights between the high and the lowly among them, and no distinction of one over another save the distinction of personal merit; that it was their duty to cooperate, and that each of them bore a responsibility he was bound to discharge toward his society. So the people of energy rose up to combat the existing evils, such as poverty, ignorance, and the other varieties of social misery; the humanitarian writers (Humanitarians) called on one another to uphold these principles and devoted their pens to the service of right and justice; and works of poetry and prose appeared saturated with the spirit of humanity, going to great lengths in describing the wretchedness of the deprived classes. It is enough for me to mention, among these humanitarians, immortal writers like Charles Dickens, author of “David Copperfield,” “The Old Curiosity Shop,” and “Great Expectations”; Victor Hugo, author of “Les Misérables”; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who set down in some of her poems the misery of child laborers — it is enough to mention these three for you to know what new feelings were surging in the breasts of the sons and daughters of the nineteenth century, and to see how keenly the select few among them felt the social evils around them and the necessity of striving to remove them.

Into this atmosphere saturated with the spirit of humanity came Florence Nightingale, the woman who, by her humane works and her service to suffering mankind, left a greater mark than any humanitarian writer who appeared in her age.

Until that time the art of nursing had been all but confined to the nuns of the convents; other women held it a lowly, despised occupation, practiced at times by servant girls when, along with the household chores, they assisted the hospital nuns and doctors. But when a woman of noble birth and lofty character like Florence Nightingale took it up as a profession, the veils of ignorance fell from people's eyes; they cast convention to the winds, and every educated woman in Europe came to look upon the art and its founder with esteem and reverence. So it is with every work we undertake: its value does not depend on its kind or its quantity, but on the way we perform it and the excellence of our mastery of it.

Florence Nightingale was born in 1820 in England,

A simple workman who is skilled at hewing stones for the building of a wall is, in my view, better than a king of great rank who misuses his power and squanders the money of his people.

into a noble family enjoying many social privileges, and this allowed her to obtain a breadth of culture rarely granted a girl in that age. From childhood she was known for her inclination to the service of the sick, and she broached to her family her insistent desire to make nursing her profession. She met with fierce resistance from them, but she did not despair; she repeated her request and waited patiently until she obtained their consent, after years during which she practiced nursing the sick among her own kin. At thirty-one she traveled to Germany and stayed two weeks, and then three months, studying the art at the hands of the Fliedners' German Evangelical sisters, called Deaconesses, at Kaiserswerth. She continued her travels and studies across western Europe, visiting the hospitals of Dublin in Ireland, then spending a month in training with the Sisters of Charity in Paris; after that she practiced nursing in a small hospital in London and then in the Middlesex Hospital. But most of her schooling was her own, for intelligence and desire were joined in her with opportunities for practice and trial, until she reached in her work a level of mastery that no nurse of her day, or before it, had attained.

At this point the Crimean War broke out, in 1854, when Florence's fame in nursing had already flown through England. Among her intimate friends was the British Secretary at War, Mr. Sidney Herbert, known for his works of reform and his humane deeds. He resolved to entrust Florence with the direction of nursing for the army, though none but nuns had ever before been given such a charge; but the English army then stood in need of such a young woman, for the French and the Russians had their nursing Sisters of Charity, who had no counterpart among the English.

Florence consented to shoulder the task, and in October she sailed to the East with forty English nurses whom she had gathered from different hospitals. The military hospital in which she took up her post at Scutari was in the worst state of neglect and filth, and the death rate among the sick ran from fifty to sixty percent.

In a short time Miss Nightingale managed to organize all the hospitals of the Crimea, and the nurses under her supervision came to number two hundred. She then devoted herself to devising a new system for the management of health affairs in the British army, and thanks to her skill and her marvelous energy the death rate fell from 50 percent to 22 per thousand — a proportion without precedent at that time.

She was the first nurse to concern herself with the soldiers' recreation and with establishing permanent centers for that purpose in the camps. She made successful efforts