May 6-12: National Nurses Week and the Legacy of Florence Nightingale

National Nurses Week occurs each year in mid-May to commemorate the birthday of Florence Nightingale on May 12, 1820 and to honor the profession that she revolutionized. This year, National Nurses Week will be celebrated from May 6-12. Here, I offer a far-too-brief synopsis of Florence Nightingale’s profound contributions to modern healthcare.

First, a little personal background. Florence Nightingale was born into a wealthy British family on May 12, 1820. Her father made sure she was educated in Italian, Greek, Latin, history, and mathematics. From an early age, she felt called to help the poor and ill and at 16, against her parents wishes, she dedicated herself to nursing, a lowly profession in Victorian England, practiced by women of dubious morals. 

As “superintendent” of a Middlesex hospital during a cholera outbreak, Florence Nightingale  improved sanitation and saw a decrease in mortality. Consequently, in 1854, Secretary of War, Sidney Herbert, asked Florence Nightingale to organize and educate a nursing corps to improve the care of British soldiers fighting against the Russians in Crimea.

Arriving in Scutari—the British base hospital in Constantinople—with 38 volunteer nurses, she found soldiers lying in their own excrement and rodents running rampant. At a time when microbes had yet to be discovered, Florence directed her nursing corps to scrub the hospital top to bottom and provide clean linens for the soldiers. She improved ventilation, flushed sewers, ordered supplies from England, systematized record-keeping practices, and used data to show how improving sanitary conditions saved lives. At night, “the lady with the lamp” made rounds on the patients—speaking with them, assessing their needs, and offering them compassion and spiritual care.

After the war, Nurse Nightingale worked with a team that included William Farr, Britain’s leading social statistician, to reform military and civilian hospitals in Britain. She is credited with pioneering the use of bar and pie charts and color-coding to present the data she collected. The impact of Florence Nightingale’s work—reforming hospitals, professionalizing nursing by emphasizing education and ethics, originating evidence-based nursing practice, and promoting statistics as a way to guide public policy—cannot be underestimated.

As noted by the annual Gallop poll, over the past 14 years the American public has rated nursing as the most trusted profession. Clearly, more than 100 years after her death in 1910, Florence Nightingale’s legacy is the strong and enduring foundation that underpins modern nursing practice.

With deep appreciation,

Laurie Barkin RN, MS

Author: The Comfort Garden: Tales from the Trauma Unit