Florence Nightingale: The Mother of Nursing

Who is a nurse if I may ask? According to Thesaurus, ‘A Nurse is defined as a person formally educated and trained in the care of the sick or infirm’, but I feel there is more to that than just healing or treating. Nursing is both an art and science. The art of fluent communication and having human sympathy with vigorous learning and application to treat a patient. As a current nurse assistant, currently interested in becoming a nurse anesthetist, I would like to inform you about the Nursing profession.

I will also be telling you about the origin, required education, job description, and outlook.

First off, I am starting with its history. Nursing is probably as old as the first childbirth or illness Because the mother has to take care and help the baby grow adequately. So I can basically say Mothers were the first nurses. Officially tho, miss Nightingale was the pioneer of modern nursing. According to Nursingschoolhub.com, ‘ Around the early to late 1900s, nursing was becoming more important than ever, as nurses were needed on the front lines of the many wars being waged, from the Crimean War to the Civil War.

Nurses were sent to attend to the sick and wounded soldiers in battle. Florence Nightingale began her illustrious nursing career as a nurse within the Crimean War that took place in the mid-1850s, tending to injured soldiers on the battlefield. During this time, deaths from injuries were commonplace, due to the lack of general hygiene and the huge amount of fatal infections that resulted from these wounds.

Upon encountering this, Nightingale asked for and received aid from the British government that allowed for much better hygiene throughout the battlefield and nearby hospital. It was due to this that the rate of death from infections dropped drastically in a short period of time. Throughout the rest of her life, Nightingale advocated for sanitary living conditions for patients, as well as providing similar designs to be implemented within hospitals, an ideal that has spread throughout the entirety of the nursing profession throughout the following years. In 1860, Nightingale opened the very first nursing school in London, which was known as the Florence Nightingale School for Nurses. This helped to pave the way for more and more schools being founded and opened officially for prospective nurses to receive actual training and education for the field they were entering, thus providing roots for modern nursing.