Florence nightingale biography england

Florence nightingale summary

Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War , in which she organised care for wounded soldiers at Constantinople. Nightingale gave nursing a favourable reputation and became an icon of Victorian culture , especially in the persona of "The Lady with the Lamp" making rounds of wounded soldiers at night.

Recent commentators have asserted that Nightingale's Crimean War achievements were exaggerated by the media at the time, but critics agree on the importance of her later work in professionalising nursing roles for women. It was the first secular nursing school in the world and is now part of King's College London.

Florence nightingale story

Her social reforms included improving healthcare for all sections of British society, advocating better hunger relief in India, helping to abolish prostitution laws that were harsh for women, and expanding the acceptable forms of female participation in the workforce. Nightingale was an innovator in statistics; she represented her analysis in graphical forms to ease drawing conclusions and actionables from data.

She is famous for usage of the polar area diagram , also called the Nightingale rose diagram, which is equivalent to a modern circular histogram. This diagram is still regularly used in data visualisation. Nightingale was a prodigious and versatile writer. In her lifetime, much of her published work was concerned with spreading medical knowledge.

Some of her tracts were written in simple English so that they could easily be understood by those with poor literary skills. She was also a pioneer in data visualisation with the use of infographics , using graphical presentations of statistical data in an effective way. Florence Nightingale was born on 12 May into a wealthy and well-connected British family at the Villa Colombaia , [ 9 ] [ 10 ] in Florence , Tuscany, Italy, and was named after the city of her birth.

Florence's older sister Frances Parthenope had similarly been named after her place of birth, Parthenope , a Greek settlement now part of the city of Naples. The family moved back to England in , with Nightingale being brought up in the family's homes at Embley, Hampshire , and Lea Hurst, Derbyshire. Florence inherited a liberal-humanitarian outlook from both sides of her family.

Fanny's father Florence's maternal grandfather was the abolitionist and Unitarian William Smith.