(icon; historically ˈflɒɾəns; 12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) was a celebrated English
nurse, writer and statistician
. She came to prominence for her pioneering work in nursing
during the Crimean War
, where she tended to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night. An Anglican, Nightingale believed that God had called her to be a nurse.
Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment, in 1860, of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital
in London
, the first secular nursing school in the world, now part of King's College London
.
Can the "word" be pinned down to either one period or one church? All churches are, of course, only more or less unsuccessful attempts to represent the unseen to the mind.
You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis & Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism.
What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine — they are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine — they are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior, jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.
Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.
I use the word nursing for want of a better. It has been limited to signify little more than the administration of medicines and the application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet — all at the least expense of vital power to the patient.
No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this — 'devoted and obedient'. This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.
Instead of wishing to see more doctors made by women joining what there are, I wish to see as few doctors, either male or female, as possible. For, mark you, the women have made no improvement — they have only tried to be men and they have only succeeded in being third-rate men.
It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm.
God has taken away the greatest man of his generation, for David Livingstone|Dr. Livingstone stood alone.
Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization, never intended at all even to take in the whole sick population.