Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale, (1820-1910). British nurse and hospital reformer. At the age of 34, during the Crimean War, she volunteered to take a party of nurses to work in the British military hospitals in Turkey. By hard work and determination she soon improved the appalling conditions there, reducing the death rate by 40 per cent; her custom of making a night round earned her the nickname ‘The Lady with the Lamp’. She returned to Britain in 1856 to enormous public acclaim and devoted the rest of her life to improving the Army’s medical service and developing civilian training for nurses and midwives., She founded the Nightingale School for Nurses, the first such school in the world, at St Thomas’s Hospital, London. In 1907 she became the first woman to receive the Order of Merit.
