Florence Nightingale was born in 1820 in Florence, Italy. Her parents were quite wealthy and she received a good education.

In those days, women from such a background were not expected to work, but Florence became bored with her life and decided to train as a nurse. Her father wasn’t very happy about this, as nursing at that time was not considered to be a worthy profession for an educated woman like Florence.

However, she eventually persuaded him to support her and she received her first nursing training in Germany. Florence began her first nursing job in London in 1853. She wasn’t paid, but in this job she proved that she was very good at organising things, as well as nursing.

During the Crimean war in 1854, after the Battle of Alma, Florence was asked to go to the hospital at the battlefront where there were reports of many men injured and dying.

She took 38 nurses to Scutari, where she found that a hospital had been set up without proper beds. The water was polluted and everything was so dirty that vermin and dysentery were an enormous danger to the patients. After a lot of hard work, Florence and her nurses cleaned up the hospital and organised adequate medical supplies. They did so well that within a few months the death rate had dropped from 42% to just 2%!

In 1856, Florence returned home to England where she continued in her struggle to improve Army medical conditions. She worked so hard that she became ill. Although she lived for another 54 years, she never fully recovered. Yet she didn’t give up fighting to improve hospital conditions and nursing standards.

An Army Medical School was set up where doctors were specially trained to deal with the types of injuries expected in war and rules were made to raise sanitary standards in barracks.

Following her time in the Crimea, in 1857 Longfellow wrote a poem, Santa Filomena, which called Florence the ‘Lady with the Lamp’ because she insisted on sitting with patients who were dying and administering medicines, even though she could have given these jobs to the other nurses.

Florence Nightingale was the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit before she died in 1910.