- Nightingale, Florence
- SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology[br]b. 15 May 1820 Florence, Italyd. 13 August 1910 London, England[br]English nurse, pioneer of the reform of nursing, hospital organization and technology.[br]Dedicated to the relief of suffering, Florence Nightingale spent her early years visiting civil and military hospitals all over Europe. She then attended a course of formal training at Kaiserwerth in Germany and with the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul in Paris.She had returned to London and was managing, after having reformed, a hostel for invalid gentlewomen when in 1854 the appalling conditions of the wounded in Turkey during the Crimean War led to her taking a party of thirty-eight nurses out to Scutari. The application of principles of hygiene and sanitation resulted in dramatic improvements in conditions and on her return to England in 1856 she applied the large sums which had been raised in her honour to the founding in 1861 of the St Thomas's School of Nursing.From this base she acted as adviser, goad and promoter of sound nursing common sense for the remainder of a long life marred by a chronic invalidism quite out of keeping with the rigorousness of her role in the nursing field. It was not only in the training and conduct of nursing that her influence was primal. Many concepts of hospital technology relating to hygiene, ventilation and ward design are to be attributed to her forthright common sense. The "Nightingale ward", for a time the target of progressive reformers, has been shown still to have abiding virtues.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsOrder of Merit 1907.Bibliography1858, Notes on Nursing.1899, Notes on Hospitals.Further ReadingC.Woodham-Smith, 1949, Florence Nightingale, London.MG
Biographical history of technology. - Taylor & Francis e-Librar. Lance Day and Ian McNeil. 2005.
