Today, May 12, the world is observing International Nurses Day to mark the contributions that nurses make to the society. The day is observed paying a tribute to Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing; since the day is her birth anniversary.
Florence Nightingale was a prominent figure in nursing whose exceptional work immensely affected 19th and 20th-century policies concerning proper care of the patients. She helped hospitals transform into cleaner places, and demonstrated that well-trained nurses and taking care of hygiene in hospitals actually helped sick people get better. Born into a wealthy family, Florence overcame the narrow opportunities offered to girls of her time. In 1851, despite the disapproval of her family, she completed a course of nursing training in Germany. Responding to newspaper accounts of soldiers` suffering in the Crimean War (1854-56), Florence answered a government appeal for nurses. Throughout the Crimean War, Nightingale’s nursing work came to prominence. She had served as a manager of nurses who she had personally trained. Alongside her, she had 38 female volunteer staff nurses who were deployed to the main British camp in Crimea. She organized the whole team, tending to the wounded soldiers, and she also began to change things around. Indeed, Nightingale is described as "a true pioneer in the graphical representation of statistics", and is credited with developing a form of the pie chart now known as the polar area diagram, equivalent to a modern circular histogram, to illustrate seasonal sources of patient mortality in the military field hospital she managed.
Florence gained the nickname `the Lady with the Lamp` during her work at Scutari. The Times reported that at night she would walk among the beds, checking the wounded men holding a light in her hand.
Nightingale was a prodigious and versatile writer. In her lifetime, much of her published work was concerned with spreading medical knowledge. She set up the Nightingale Training School at St Thomas` Hospital on 9 July 1860 with the money donated by well-wishers in her fund.
Before Florence Nightingale, nursing was not considered a respectable profession. She lived a long and wondrous life of 90 years. She passed away in 1910, at the age of 90. During the restlessness she emerged as a war hero and leader of a society of women that spans the world over to this day.