The Lady With The Lamp

by Fern

When we think of the stereotypical Victorian woman, we think of a woman educated in the finer arts of embroidery and serving tea and appropriate behavior at social occasions who is expected to marry and keep a wonderful home for her husband and children. She is not expected to be involved in the events of the day or even read the daily newspaper. She is also not expected to be educated in subjects such as history or mathematics. Florence Nightingale, however, was an anomaly. She was recruited in 1854 during the Crimean War to serve as Superintendent of the Female Nurses. She arrived in Scutari in early November with thirty other nurses. It was there, administering to the wounded and dying, she became known as the Lady with the Lamp. She carried her lamp during her night rounds as she tried to give solace to the soldiers. This story, however, is not what is most important about the career of Florence Nightingale. There is ever so much more that defined her during a career which lasted fifty years. Miss Nightingale saw wounded soldiers dying while in the hospital because of the deplorable conditions there; in fact, soldiers were seven times more likely to die from diseases in the hospital than on the battlefield. She began to keep records and data to calculate the mortality rate, plotted the incidences of preventable deaths and statistically proved that more sanitary conditions would give soldiers a greater chance to survive. The mortality rate dropped remarkably when her suggestions about sanitary conditions and diet were put into effect. This led her to the designing of hospitals which would save, not lose lives. Her designs included better ventilation, more windows, improved drainage and a high standard of hygiene and sanitary conditions. She also established the first training school for nurses which created standards for the profession. She was the first woman elected to the Statistical Society because of the work she did during the war. Her book, Notes on Nursing, defined the principles of the profession. She died in 1910 at the age of ninety. She never married but did have, over the course of her lifetime, about sixty cats. One of them was a Persian cat named Bismarck.