The Nightingale School of Nursing
Following her time in the Crimea, Nightingale established the first school for nursing in this country, which opened in 1860. She taught nurses that wards should be clean and caring should be compassionate.
This website illustrates the impact of Florence Nightingale’s work. Here you can see that the the trainees disperse throughout the United Kingdom and the Empire, taking with them their knowledge of nursing and understanding for the need for cleanliness. These ideas can still be seen today in many Hospitals. The long, open wards that remain in some hospitals are known as Nightingale Wards. Though now dated and lacking in modern comforts, the fact that they still are in use illustates how significant her methods were. This approach was in stark contrast to the way in which hospitals had been run previously. Overcrowded wards, filthy conditions and a lack of trained staff and time to pay careful attention to patients had previously been the way in which hospitals had been run.
Source 1
“To be a good nurse, one must be an improving woman; for stagnant waters sooner or later, and stagnant air, as we know ouselves, always grow corrupt and unfit for use. Is any one of us a stagnant woman?”
Nightingale to trainees at her school.
Source 2
Florence Nightingale on health in the countryside
Watersupply almost entirely from shallow wells, often uncovered, mostly in the cottagegarden, not far from a pervious privy pit, a pigsty, or a huge collection of house refuse, polluted by the foulness soaking into it. The liquid manure from the pigsty trickles through the ground into the well. Often after heavy rain the cottagers complain that their wellwater becomes thick.
The water in many shallow wells has been analysed. And some have been closed; others cleaned out. But when no particular impurity is detected, no care has been taken to stop the too threatening pollution, or to prohibit the supply. In one village which had a pump, it was so far from one end that a pond in an adjoining field was used for their supply.
It may be said that, up to the present time, practically nothing has been done by the Sanitary Authorities to effect the removal of house refuse, etc.
From Florence Nightingale, Selected Writings of Florence Nightingale, ed. Lucy Ridgely Seymer (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1954), pp. 38287 hosted online at the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history
