Florence Nightingale history

Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, in Florence, Italy. She was the younger of two children. Nightingale’s affluent British family belonged to elite social circles. Her mother, Frances Nightingale, hailed from a family of merchants and Florence’s father William shore Nightingale was a wealthy landowner.

 From a very young age, Florence Nightingale was active in philanthropy, ministering to the ill and poor people in the village neighboring her family’s estate. She believed it to be her divine purpose. When Nightingale approached her parents and told them about her ambitions to become a nurse, they were not pleased. In fact, her parents forbade her to pursue nursing. When Nightingale was 17 years old, she refused a marriage proposal from a “suitable” gentle man, Richard Monckton Milnes.

Nightingale explained her reason for turning him down, saying that while he stimulated her intellectually and romantically, her “moral….active nature…requires satisfaction, and that would not find it in this life.”Determined to pursue her true calling despite her parents’ objections, in 1844, Nightingale enrolled as a nursing student at the Lutheran Hospital of Pastor Fliedner in Kaiserwerth, Germany .In the early 1850s, Nightingale returned to London, where she took a nursing Job in a Middlesex hospital for ailing governesses.

 Her performance there so impressed her employer that Nightingale was promoted to superintendent within just a year of being hired. Throughout her life, she worked in different hospitals and different wars to nurse the injured soldiers and common people. In 1908, at the age of 88, she was conferred the merit of honour by King Edward for her extraordinary service to the British Government and devotion towards the distressed humanity. In May of 1910, she received a congratulatory message from King George on her 90^th birthday. In August 1910, Florence Nightingale fell ill, but seemed to recover and was reportedly in good spirits.

A week later, on the evening of Friday, August 12, 1910, she developed an array of troubling symptoms. She died unexpectedly at 2 pm the following day, Saturday, August 13, at her home in London. The “Lady with the Lamp” was laid to rest in a family plot at Westminster Abbey .Today , Florence Nightingale is broadly acknowledged and revered as the pioneer of modern nursing.