Florence Nightingale - The Angel With The Lamp - By: Kathryn Dawson

War is never a prescription for good health and in the fall of 1854 the battlefields of the Crimean War were no exception. Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire had joined together as unlikely allies, attempting to defend the ‘holy lands’ of the Crimea from Russian encroachment. It was an age of new technology, with the telegraph and railways being in common use at the time. It was also a new age when it come to the weapons and tactics of war; long range artillery was in use necessitating the tactic of digging trenches to hide your forces from the enemy. The innovation of spinning rifle shells which were given greater distance and accuracy through new grooved rifle barrels enabled sharpshooters to ply their deadly trade as never before. Battlefield tactics as practiced in years before were now obsolete. The art of war had to now be redrawn to address it’s newer deadlier fashion and nowhere was this felt more acutely than in the hospitals treating the battle-wounded.

In the mid-1800s doctors had yet to take germ theory seriously. Hospitals and surgeons looked on sanitation and hygiene as unaffordable luxuries instead of the crucial necessities we now know they are. The majority of soldiers who died during the Crimean war, died not from the wounds they received in battle, but from the infections and diseases rampant in the unsanitary hospitals they found themselves being treated in. Of course doctors and nurses strived to do their best but they knew no better. In the final analysis, the last place you wanted to go if you were wounded in battle was, ironically, the hospital.

It was in one such festering pit of unsanitary and disease-ridden conditions that young Florence Nightingale found herself serving as a freshly-trained nurse in October of 1854. Florence and her aunt Mai Smith and 37 other voluntary nurses were assigned to the Selimiye Barracks in Turkey, a sprawling rectangular building being used by the British as a temporary military hospital, mainly treating troops who were fighting in Balaklava, 540 kilometers across the Black Sea in Crimea.

The conditions in the Selimiye Barracks during the fall of 1854 were appalling. Doctors and nurses, were overworked to the point of ignoring the pleas of the more critical of patients for sake of saving those few they had time to treat. Sanitation was severely lacking and hygiene was lamentably poor. During the first few months of Florence’s assignment at Selimiye Barracks over 4,000 soldiers died, 80 percent of them from typhus, cholera and dysentery: illnesses resultant from the unsanitary conditions of the hospital itself.

Reports vary as to the role Florence Nightingale herself played in the improvements to sanitation and hygiene at Selimiye Barracks - improvements that lowered the hospital’s mortality rate from 42% to 2% - but throughout the remainder of her career she promoted and campaigned for hospital cleanliness and hygiene as a preventative medical treatment and method of avoiding infection and the spread of disease.

However, Florence did make a major, undeniable contribution to the quality of care at Selimiye Barracks that changed nursing and medical assistant jobs forever. Her fame as a caring, empathetic figure made compassion a primary role of nurses from that time forward even so far as being memorialized in numerous poems and soldier’s memoirs from the period. Immortalized as “The Lady with the Lamp”, Nightingale was remembered for her nighttime rounds through the hospital, comforting the sick and injured.

After her return from Turkey Florence became an active advocate of nursing and general hospital sanitation, establishing norms and procedure which are still in use today. Most nurses, when finishing their training still take the Nightingale pledge:

• I solemnly pledge myself before God and in the presence of this assembly, to pass my life in purity and to practice my profession faithfully.
• I will abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous, and will not take or knowingly administer any harmful drug.
• I will do all in my power to maintain and elevate the standard of my profession, and will hold in confidence all personal matters committed to my keeping and all family affairs coming to my knowledge in the practice of my calling.
• With loyalty will I endeavor to aid the physician, in his work, and devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care.

About the Author

Kathryn Dawson writes articles for Jobs 4 Medical, an online portal where medical professionals of all disciplines seek jobs and post vacancies. Find medical assistant jobs where they are required globally. There are nurses jobs and phlebotomy jobs available in their constantly refreshed database.

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