Country of Birth

Italy, of British parents

Industry

Healthcare

Top Achievements

Florence Nightingale’s social reforms improved healthcare and living conditions for all sections of society in Victorian-era Britain and beyond. An innovator in statistics, she revolutionized military and civilian sanitation with her ability to lead and organize social change.

Early Life and Education

Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, to wealthy English parents who were on an extended vacation in Florence, Italy. In 1821 the Nightingale family returned to the family estate in Derbyshire, England. Educated at home by her father, young Florence showed particular ability in mathematics, which she would later use in her work as a statistician. From a very young age, she was an active philanthropist, assisting the poor and sick in the village near her home.

Despite opposition from her family, she firmly rejected the expected role for a young lady of her social status, which was to marry a suitably wealthy man and bear children. In 1850, she visited the Lutheran Hospital in Kaiserwerth, Germany, where she received four months of medical training.

Early Career

In 1853, Nightingale took the position of superintendent at the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London. A year later she went to Scutari, the British base in Constantinople (today Istanbul), to care for the British soldiers fighting in the Crimean War. Military hospital hygiene was appalling with more soldiers dying from rampant infectious diseases than from wounds sustained in combat.

She is widely known for her nursing work in Crimea, and she continued promoting and organizing the nursing profession for the rest of her life. However, her military hospital experience served as the basis for her subsequent and less-known work in public and private sanitary reform.

Achievements in Her Field

When the Crimean War ended in 1856, Nightingale returned to England. Helping to create a Royal Commission into the health of the army, she used her ability as a statistician to analyze the data on mortality rates from Scutari and represented it using polar area diagrams, now known as Nightingale Rose Diagrams. Her work led to a massive reorganization of the British War Office.

Amongst other accomplishments, Nightingale investigated the health of the army in British colonial India and having brought the field of public health to national attention, she successfully lobbied for compulsory sanitation and mains drainage in private houses, with the transference of public health legislation to local authorities who could most effectively manage issues in their own communities.

From the age of 38, Nightingale was intermittently bedridden due to “Crimean Fever”, contracted at Scutari. She continued her advocacy work until her death in 1910 at the age of 90.

Recognition

In 1859 she was elected as the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society and in 1874 was named an honorary member of the American Statistical Association. In 1907, she was the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit.

Additional Facts

Popularly known as ‘The Lady with the Lamp’ she was actually nicknamed ‘The Lady with the Hammer’ by troops in Crimea, after using a hammer to break open locked medicine cabinets.

Nightingale was frequently consulted about sanitation and management of field hospitals in the American Civil War.