historyNLM Circulating Now1854–1855 · Scutari, Ottoman Empire
The Lady Who Became a Nurse
Florence Nightingale transformed military nursing during the Crimean War in 1854. Arriving at the Scutari hospital with 38 volunteer nurses, she found soldiers dying in filth, with about ten times more men dying of disease such as typhus, cholera and dysentery than of battle wounds. She improved supplies, washed linen, bought towels and soap, cleaned kitchens and wards, and the hospital's death rate fell by about two-thirds. Her insistence that sanitation saved lives became the foundation of modern nursing.
Most soldiers were dying from infections spread through dirt, lice, poor water and neglected wounds rather than from injuries. Cleaning the environment and feeding the men reduced those infections, which is why mortality fell so sharply.
Her work proved that hygiene and organisation could save more soldiers than surgery alone, and the statistics she collected pushed the British army to reform its medical services. Her later work reformed civilian hospitals and founded a nurse-training school, making nursing a respected profession.
Ignaz Semmelweis showed around the same time that handwashing cut deaths from childbed fever, part of a wider shift toward germ-aware medicine.
Nightingale was a pioneer of statistical graphics, using polar-area diagrams to show soldiers' causes of death to officials.
U.S. National Library of Medicine
Illustrative photo · Henry Hering (1814-1893), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
