Florence Nightingale: 3 Accomplishments Of The First Nurse

Born	12th of May, 1820
Died	13th of August, 1910
Famous Quote	“Never give nor take an excuse.”
Known For	Creating modern nursing
Region of World	West, England/U.K
Further Reading	The Absolute 9 Most Influential Women In History

Today millions of people in the world are impacted by the accomplishments of Florence Nightingale. Of these accomplishments 3 stand out above all others.

The 3 major accomplishments of Florence Nightingale are creating modern secular nursing, pioneering medical data analytics, and spreading modern medical knowledge around the world.

Here at The History Ace, I strive to publish the best history articles on the web. If you like content like this feel free to share around and sign up for the free newsletter to remain up to date on all things history.

Without further ado, here are the 3 main accomplishments of Florence Nightingale.

Creating Modern Secular Nursing

From an early age Florence Nightingale exhibited a love for two things; Life and mathematics.

Over the course of her young life both Nightingale and her family would push for her to follow her passions. This allowed her to focus 100% on the field of nursing.

This eventually led her to the Crimean War in support of the British. The conditions that wounded soldiers experienced during this war were horrific according to Nightingale.

The mortality rate for wounded soldiers in the Crimean war was nearly 42% due to infection and illness experienced from battlefield wounds.

This astounded the young Nightingale who immediately wrote to the English newspaper The Times about the situation. As a result, the British government sent a prefabricated hospital to Crimea to help with the wounded.

As a result of this, the mortality rate among wounded soldiers during the Crimean war dropped from nearly 42% to an astounding 2%.

This was due to Florence Nightingale pushing for better nutrition standards along with cleaner facilities and better medical care. For example, during the war Nightingale implemented a handwashing practice to cut down on bacteria growth.

After the Crimean War Nightingale would return back to England to set up the world’s first secular nursing hospital at the King’s College of London.

For Nightingale religion played no part in the world of nursing. The only thing that mattered was creating a clean and controlled environment to allow for patients to heal.

This was a huge accomplishment that ended up creating the modern field of nursing. To this day nurses in the United States have to take a pledge upon graduating from their nursing program called the Nightingale Pledge.

Because of this one of the main accomplishments of Florence Nightingale is the creation of modern secular nursing. To this day millions of people around the world are impacted by Nightingale’s vision of what nursing could be.

Pioneering Medical Data Analytics

Nightingale was an avid statistician who cataloged endless amounts of notes on medical proceedings and findings. The above image is from her time in the Crimean War.

Not only is the above image a simple way of demonstrating advanced data but it is the world’s first polar area chart, or the Nightingale rose diagram. This diagram created modern medical data analytics.

From this medical personnel such as nurses and doctors could easily identify interlinked causes of death. From here they could infer possible treatments. This drastically increased the survivability rate of patients during the war and after.

Upon returning to England Florence Nightingale would create her nursing school that continued to teach medical practices such as data analytics. Since then all modern nurses and doctors have used Florence Nightingale’s methodologies to highlight and streamline patient care.

Today, we know this process as data science. The field of healthcare pioneered this and today continues to make advancements.

This all started with Florence Nightingale. To this day millions of people around the world are saved because of one lady’s ability to combine nursing and statistics.

Spreading Modern Medical Knowledge Around The World

Over the course of her life Florence Nightingale wrote over 200 books, articles, and pamphlets.

Within this massive corpus of text, Florence Nightingale wrote extensively about the role of women in the west during the 19th century.

One of her best-known essays “Cassandra” calls into question the role of upper-class Victorian-era women in marriage.

The main theme in Nightingale’s work was Women’s rights. She was a major proponent of the Women’s Suffrage movement and equal rights throughout society.

Further, she wrote extensively on the role of medicine within society. She purposely wrote these pamphlets to be readable by the common English person so that they too could practice the teachings.

As a result knowledge of the medical profession expanded across the world faster than ever before. By the end of Nightingale’s life she was a medical author who helped treat patients from the United States to China. All of this is because she wrote extensively on the power of medicine within society.

This spreading of medical knowledge is one of Florence Nightingale’s major accomplishments. Today all doctors around the world follow similar practices because of Florence Nightingale.

Conclusion

There you have it; an article that goes over the 3 main accomplishments of Florence Nightingale.

Not only was she a careful nurse and statistician but she also was a prolific writer. Because of this, her legacy lives on and she has become one of the most influential women in history.

Here at The History Ace, I strive to publish the best history articles on the internet. If you like content like this feel free to share around and subscribe to the newsletter to remain up to date on all things history.

Further, you can check out some of the other articles below. 

Sincerely,

Nick