BICENTENARY OF THE BIRTH OF FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

About:

• Florence (1820 – 1910) was born to a wealthy English family in Florence, Italy, and named after the city.
  
  
• She became famous as a result of her innovations in nursing care at Scutari hospital in modern-day Istanbul, where she treated British soldiers wounded in the Crimean War of 1854, in which British, French and Ottoman forces fought the Russian Empire.
  
  
• Every night she would make rounds through the camps, checking on each soldier, a practice that saw her nicknamed the “Lady with the Lamp”.
  
  
• She used statistics as a way of proving the effectiveness of different interventions. She produced her famous “rose” diagrams, which demonstrated the high proportion of deaths caused by disease as opposed to battle wounds.
  
  
• As a result of this work, she became the first woman admitted to the London Statistical Society, in 1858.