Poems, songs, and plays were written and dedicated in the heroine’s honor. Nightingale became a figure of public admiration. She left in the summer of 1856, once the Crimean conflict was resolved, and returned to her childhood home at Lea Hurst. Nightingale remained at Scutari for a year and a half. She also instituted a classroom and a library for patients’ intellectual stimulation and entertainment. She established a laundry so that patients would have clean linens. She instituted the creation of an “invalid’s kitchen” where appealing food for patients with special dietary requirements was cooked. Nightingale created a number of patient services that contributed to improving the quality of their hospital stay. The soldiers, who were both moved and comforted by her endless supply of compassion, took to calling her “the Lady with the Lamp.” Others simply called her “the Angel of the Crimea.” Her work reduced the hospital’s death rate by two-thirds. In the evenings she moved through the dark hallways carrying a lamp while making her rounds, ministering to patient after patient. Nightingale herself spent every waking minute caring for the soldiers. She procured hundreds of scrub brushes and asked the least infirm patients to scrub the inside of the hospital from floor to ceiling. When arrived Nightingale saw the horrid conditions the soldiers were living in and went to work. She quickly assembled a team of 34 nurses from a variety of religious orders and sailed with them to the Crimea just a few days later. In late 1854, Nightingale received a letter from Secretary of War Sidney Herbert, asking her to organize a corps of nurses to tend to the sick and fallen soldiers in the Crimea.
She had just barely when she got her first big break. Nightingale made it her mission to improve hygiene practices, significantly lowering the death rate at the hospital in the process.
The position proved challenging as Nightingale grappled with a cholera outbreak and unsanitary conditions conducive to the rapid spread of the disease. Her performance there so impressed her employer that Nightingale was promoted to the superintendent within just a year of being hired. In the early 1850s, Nightingale returned to London, where she took a nursing job in a Middlesex hospital for ailing governesses. Nightingale explained her reason for turning him down, saying that while he stimulated her intellectually and romantically, her “moral…active nature…requires satisfaction, and that would not find it in this life.” Determined to pursue her true calling despite her parents’ objections, in 1844, Nightingale enrolled as a nursing student at the Lutheran Hospital of Pastor Fliedner in Kaiserwerth, Germany. When Nightingale was 17 years old, she refused a marriage proposal from a “suitable” gentleman, Richard Monckton Milnes. During the Victorian Era, a young lady of Nightingale’s social stature was expected to marry a man of means-not take up a job that was viewed as lowly menial labor by the upper social classes. Her parents forbade her to pursue nursing. When Nightingale approached her parents and told them about her ambitions to become a nurse, they were not pleased. By the time she was 16 years old, it was clear to her that nursing was her calling. From a very young age, Florence Nightingale was active in philanthropy, ministering to the ill and poor people in the village neighboring her family’s estate. Florence was raised on the family estate at Lea Hurst, where her father provided her with a classical education, including studies in German, French and Italian. Florence’s father was William Shore Nightingale, a wealthy landowner who had inherited two estates-one at Lea Hurst, Derbyshire, and the other in Hampshire, Embley Park-when Florence was five years old. Still, like many daughters, she was eager to please her mother. Strong-willed, Florence often disagreed with her mother, whom she viewed as overly controlling. She preferred to avoid being the center of attention whenever possible.
Despite her mother’s interest in social climbing. Her mother, Frances, came from a family of merchants prominent social standing members of the society. Nightingale’s affluent British family belonged to elite social circles. Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, in Florence, Italy to Frances Nightingale and William Shore Nightingale.
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