Nightingale, Florence (1820–1910)

Portrait of Florence Nightingale by an unknown artist.

English nurse, the founder of nursing as a profession. She took a team of nurses to Scutari (now Üsküdar, Turkey) in 1854 and reduced the Crimean War hospital death rate from 42% to 2%. In 1860 she founded the Nightingale School and Home for Nurses in London, attached to St Thomas's Hospital, London.

Born in Florence, Italy, she trained in Germany and France. She was the author of the classic Notes on Nursing (1859), the first textbook for nurses. In 1907 she was awarded the Order of Merit.

Florence Nightingale was involved with philanthropic and social work in England from an early age, and in 1844 she visited many hospitals and reformatories in Europe. In 1851 she trained as a nurse at an institution of the Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth, on the River Rhine, Germany, and on her return to England devoted herself to the Governesses' Sanatorium in connection with the London Institute.

At the beginning of the Crimean War, appalled by the sufferings of the wounded, Florence Nightingale volunteered her services and sailed in 1854 with a party of 38 nurses, including Sisters of Mercy from England and Ireland. Her self-sacrificing services to the wounded made her name famous throughout Europe. She wrote several pamphlets on nursing and hospitals, and established a fund in 1857 for the purpose of training nurses at St Thomas's and King's College hospitals, London.

The Verney–Nightingale papers afford interesting details of her relations with Benjamin Jowett, an Oxford University professor who wished to marry her; the politician and philanthropist Richard Monckton Milnes (1809–1885), a great admirer; and her friends Sidney Herbert, the politician who was responsible for sending her to the Crimean front, and the poet Arthur Hugh Clough.