Florence
Nightingale helped to transform nursing into a respectable profession, and she
will forever be remembered as the first great nurse of the world. Born into the
upper class, she refused to live the kind of life that proper British ladies were
expected to lead -- Florence thought that women should be involved in social service,
so she decided to study nursing. In 1854, during the Crimean War, she brought
a team of nurses she had trained to Turkey and was shocked at the horrible conditions
of the hospitals that treated the soldiers. She used her own money to bring in
more supplies and to make the hospitals cleaner and healthier. Her changes to
increase standards for sanitation and nutrition dramatically reduced the death
rates of patients and helped revolutionize British military medical care. She
helped to establish the first Visiting Nurse Association in 1859, and the next
year set up a nursing school that would become a model for training nurses. Florence
Nightingale's selfless devotion to caring for the sick and injured has been an
inspiration to many generations of men and women to choose the nursing profession
as their way to make the world a better place.
