Florence Nightingale is one of the founders of modern nursing – famous for her life-saving efforts in the Crimean War.
Florence Nightingale is one of the founders of modern nursing - famous for her life-saving efforts in the Crimean War.
She was born into an educated family and grew up in Derbyshire, receiving a classical education from her father.
In her twenties she travelled in Europe and Egypt, studying healthcare, and in 1853 took charge of the Hospital for Invalid Gentlewomen in London.
That year saw the outbreak of the Crimean War — in which England, France and Turkey joined forces against Russia in a dispute over the treatment of Christians in the Turkish Empire.
Thanks to the invention of the telegraph, Britons for the first time had access to up-to-date Press reports from the front.
And the news of the appalling conditions endured by the wounded at the barracks hospital in Scutari, Turkey, caused a scandal.
Florence was friendly with Britain’s Secretary of War, Sir Sidney Herbert, and volunteered to lead 38 nurses to care for the soldiers.
Once in Scutari, they found the victims lying on the abandoned barracks’ filthy floor. Men were dying all around them.
There were no toilets and sanitation was impossible.
The men ate their one meal a day with their hands because there were no knives or forks. Some days they simply went hungry.
Within a week, Florence and her nurses had set up a kitchen and were feeding men from their own supplies.
She enlisted any help she could get from the able-bodied and dug latrines, cleaned the barracks and ensured laundry was done.
The wounded were properly fed and properly nursed.
Florence personally tended to the men, carrying a lamp on her rounds after dark.
She even made sure that, for the first time, wounded soldiers received sick pay.
The death rate among the wounded plummeted, from 60 per cent when Florence arrived to two per cent within six months.
By the end of the war in 1856, by which time another makeshift hospital had been set up at Balaclava, it was down to just one per cent.
Aside from the lives she saved in the Crimea, Florence earned her place in history by establishing nursing as a valued and respected profession.
It had previously been seen as a menial task done by untrained personnel.
In 1860 she founded the Nightingale School and Home for Nurses at St Thomas’s Hospital in London — the beginning of professional training in nursing.
She won many honours and in 1907 was the first woman to receive the Order of Merit.
In 1915, five years after her death, the Crimean Monument in Waterloo Place, London, was erected in her honour.
Charge of the light brigade
The Charge of the Light Brigade was one of history’s great military blunders — but it was not the abject disaster that is commonly believed.
The charge, lasting only 20 minutes in all, was the result of a communications mix-up during the 1854 Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War.
British commander Lord Fitzroy James Raglan told the Cavalry Brigade, led by Lord George Lucan, to recapture three Russian gun emplacements.
Raglan sent Captain Lewis Nolan to give the order to Lucan. But Lucan could not see the emplacements — and when he asked where they were Nolan angrily waved his hand in their direction . . . as well as at the main Russian position.
Lucan, prone to panic under pressure, then ordered the Light Brigade, led by his brother-in-law Lord James Cardigan, to advance on the MAIN Russian guns instead of the three emplacements.
They rode down a valley and came under heavy fire. Nolan was killed by shrapnel while galloping past Cardigan trying to tell him he was going the wrong way.
The Light Brigade managed to force the Russian cavalry back a significant distance before having to withdraw because they were heavily outnumbered.
The popular myth that the Charge was a disaster grew after it was immortalised in a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
But in fact the Russians, including their commander General Liprandi, were hugely impressed by the Britons’ courage.
And the Russian cavalry refused to fight them for the rest of the war, even when they had a huge advantage in numbers.
lightbox mind boggler
