Florence Nightingale (; 12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) was an English social reformer, statistician and the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organised care for wounded soldiers at Constantinople. She significantly reduced death rates by improving hygiene and living standards. Nightingale gave nursing a favourable reputation and became an icon of Victorian culture, especially in the persona of "The Lady with the Lamp" making ward rounds for wounded soldiers at night.
Recent commentators have asserted that Nightingale's Crimean War achievements were exaggerated by the media at the time, but critics agree on the importance of her later work in professionalising nursing roles for women. She criticised early women's rights activists for decrying an alleged lack of careers for women at the same time that lucrative medical positions, under the supervision of Nightingale and others, went perpetually unfilled. She preferred the friendship of powerful men, insisting they had done more than women to help her attain her goals, writing: "I have never found one woman who has altered her life by one iota for me or my opinions." She often referred to herself as, for example, "a man of action" and "a man of business".
However, she did have several important and long-lasting friendships with women. Later in life, she kept up a prolonged correspondence with Irish nun Mary Clare Moore, with whom she had worked in Crimea. Her most beloved confidante was Mary Clarke, an Englishwoman she met in Paris in 1837 and kept in touch with throughout her life. She was friends with pioneering computer programmer Ada Lovelace, and upon Lovelace's death from cancer at 36 in 1852 after several months of pain, Nightingale wrote, "They said she could not possibly have lived so long, were it not for the tremendous vitality of the brain, that would not die".
Some scholars of Nightingale's life believe that she remained chaste for her entire life, perhaps because she felt a religious calling to her career.
Death
thumb|upright=0.8|Nightingale's grave in the churchyard of St Margaret's Church, [[Wellow, Hampshire|East Wellow, Hampshire|alt=Nightingale's grave in St Margaret's Church.]]
Florence Nightingale died peacefully in her sleep in her room at 10 South Street, Mayfair, London, on 13 August 1910, at the age of 90. The offer of burial in Westminster Abbey was declined by her relatives and she is buried in the churchyard of St Margaret's Church in East Wellow, Hampshire, near Embley Park with a memorial with just her initials and dates of birth and death. She left a large body of work, including several hundred notes that were previously unpublished. A monument to Nightingale was created in Carrara marble by Francis William Sargant in 1913 and placed in the cloister of the Basilica of Santa Croce, in Florence, Italy.
Contributions
Statistics and sanitary reform
Florence Nightingale exhibited a gift for mathematics from an early age and excelled in the subject under the tutelage of her father. Later, Nightingale became a pioneer in the visual presentation of information and statistical graphics. She used methods such as the pie chart, which had first been developed by William Playfair in 1801. While common now, it was at the time a relatively novel method of presenting data.
Indeed, Nightingale is described as "a true pioneer in the graphical representation of statistics" and is especially well known for her usage of a polar area diagram, and Léon Louis Lalanne by 1830. Nightingale called a compilation of such diagrams a "coxcomb", but later that term would frequently be used for the individual diagrams. thumb|"Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East" (1858) by Florence Nightingale, a colored pie chart to illustrate causes of death in the British ArmyShe made extensive use of coxcombs to present reports on the nature and magnitude of the conditions of medical care in the Crimean War to Members of Parliament and civil servants who would have been unlikely to read or understand traditional statistical reports. In 1859, Nightingale was elected the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society. In 1874 she became an honorary member of the American Statistical Association.
Her attention turned to the health of the British Army in India and she demonstrated that bad drainage, contaminated water, overcrowding, and poor ventilation were causing the high death rate. Following the report The Royal Commission on India (1858–1863), which included drawings done by her cousin, artist Hilary Bonham Carter, with whom Nightingale had lived, Nightingale concluded that the health of the army and the people of India had to go hand in hand and so campaigned to improve the sanitary conditions of the country as a whole. The strengthened legislation was enacted in the Public Health Acts of 1874 and 1875. At the same time, she combined with the retired sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick to persuade Stansfeld to devolve powers to enforce the law to local authorities, eliminating central control by medical technocrats. Her Crimean War statistics had convinced her that non-medical approaches were more effective given the state of knowledge at the time. Historians now believe that both drainage and devolved enforcement played a crucial role in increasing average national life expectancy by 20 years between 1871 and the mid-1930s during which time medical science made no impact on the most fatal epidemic diseases.
Literature and the women's movement
Historian of science I. Bernard Cohen argues:
Despite her intense personal devotion to Christ, Nightingale believed for much of her life that the pagan and eastern religions had also contained genuine revelation. She was a strong opponent of discrimination both against Christians of different denominations and against those of non-Christian religions. Nightingale believed religion helped provide people with the fortitude for arduous good work and would ensure the nurses in her care attended religious services. However, she was often critical of organised religion. She disliked the role the 19th century Church of England would sometimes play in worsening the oppression of the poor. Nightingale argued that secular hospitals usually provided better care than their religious counterparts. While she held that the ideal health professional should be inspired by a religious as well as professional motive, she said that in practice many religiously motivated health workers were concerned chiefly in securing their own salvation and that this motivation was inferior to the professional desire to deliver the best possible care. She set an example of compassion, commitment to patient care and diligent and thoughtful hospital administration. The first official nurses' training programme, her Nightingale School for Nurses, opened in 1860 and is now called the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery at King's College London.