Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was a British social reformer and a founder of modern nursing. She also contributed to the development of statistics as a science. Florence Nightingale was born to a wealthy family belonging to the higher social classes and received spectacular home education. She knew several European languages and excelled at mathematics. Yet, the military life was of little interest to her, and at the age of 17, she decided to dedicate her life to nursing. She started her nursing career helping poor people in the village near her estate. She spent a lot of time educating herself and received formal education at the Institution of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth in Germany. After she worked as a superintendent of a hospital in London and continued her career in Turkey, nursing the wounded officers in the Crimean War, there she started introducing her revolutionary ideas on nursing and laid the fundamental of infographics, as she virtually used statistical data to prove the productivity of her methods. Upon returning to London, she established the first in the world nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital and was actively pursuing social change. International nursing day is celebrated on Nightingale's birthday.