Mentors Matter
Florence Nightengale
Founder of Modern Nursing
Florence Nightengale (1820-1910) is synonymous with the modern profession of nursing. During the Crimean war (1853) between Britain and Russia, she had a crew of thirty-four nurses go to Constantinople in abominable conditions and here she (rightly or wrongly) takes on a mythical status of “the lady with a lamp” or “the angel of Crimea” because of her tireless compassion and fastidious systems of hygiene which saved the lives of hundreds if not thousands of British military soldiers. This wins her national recognition by Queen Eliz-abeth who bestows upon her “The Nightengale Jewel” and her nation venerates her with poems, songs, and plays. While this event is the defining historical moment that places her solidly in British and world history, this may be less monumental (and even somewhat debata-ble in its singularity as there were other women groups serving as nurses in Crimea to include Mary Secole) than another less well-known place she takes in medical history.
Statistics and Ethics
What may be surprising to some is that Florence Nightengale’s place in medical statistics, no less as a female, was monolithic especially for the mid-1800’s. Equal to her labor and commitment in Crimea, and perhaps what sets her apart from anyone, is her 830 page re-port analyzing and proposing reforms for military hospitals called, “Notes on Matters Affect-ing the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army.” It was this report and its statistics including the novel statical diagram (named after her called the Nighten-gale Rose Diagram), or perhaps even better said, Florence Nightengale’s organizational tal-ent of her mind that assembled the report that led to the establishment of the Royal Com-mission for Health (1857). This led to the employment of William Farr (and John Suther-land) who goes down in history as “the Father of medical statistics.”
If William Farr is the father of medical statistics, then surely Florence Nightengale is its mother. She was recognized as the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society. It was in medical statistics, that Florence Nightengale achieved her greatest unquestionable legitimacy in proving mathematically that 16,000 -18,000 deaths in the Crimean War oc-curred from disease unrelated to battle, and these were all preventable! Florence Nighten-gale appears to be the first to prove the assertion that more soldiers die in war from dis-ease than from battle. Her medical statistic keeping became a military force for Britain.
Her report in 1859, Notes on Hospitals asserting rules of good nursing in military hospitals became a template for the American Civil War (1861 - 1865) where female nurses instead of male stewards were used, and led to the appointment of Dorthy Dix as the first US super-
intendent of nurses, and led the way for America’s Clara Barton to be the “Angel of the Bat-tlefield” and later the founder of the American Red Cross. Shortly after the war, the US say her first nursing school in New York City at Bellevue Hospital in 1873.
Florence Nightengale was not simply a bright mathematical and organizational mind with prolific writing skills, she was driven by a deep religious commitment that she carried with her every day and throughout her life. Her inner moral conviction was her fuel and her sta-tistical proof became her power to pursue others. She was a synergistic dynamo of statis-tics and ethics perfectly blended in the medical care of others.