Florence Nightingale

Abstract On her death in 1910, Florence nightingale left a vast collection of reports, letters, nones and different written material. there are numerous domainations that illuminate go for of this material, often highlighting Florences attitude to a particular issue. In this paper we gather a set of quotations and construct a dialogue with Florence Nightingale on the checkmate of statistics. Our dialogue draws attention to strong points of connection between Florence Nightingales use of statistics and modern evidence-based approaches to medicine and globe wellness.We offer our dialogue as a memor able way to draw the attention of students to the key mathematical function of info-based evidence in medicine and in the conduct of public affairs. 1. Introduction 1. 1 Who Was Florence Nightingale? Florence Nightingale (1820 1910), hereafter referred to as FN, make remarkable use of her ninety years of life. She was the second of two daughters, natural in England to wealthy and well-connected parents. in that location were varied spectral influences. Her parents two came from a Unitarian religious tradition that emphasized deeds, not creeds.The family associated with the church building of England (Baly 1997b) when property that FNs father had inherited brought with it parochial duties. A further religious influence was her tremblership with the Irish Sister Mary Clare Moore, the founding excellent of the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy in Bermondsey, London. Her father supervised and took the study responsibility for his daughters education, which include classical and modern languages, history, and philosophy. When she was 20 he arranged, at FNs insistence, tutoring in mathematics.These and other influences inculcated a strong sense of public duty, independence of mind, a fierce intellectual honesty, a radical and go-as-you-please religious mysticism from which she found succour in her varied endeavours, and an intransigent attitude both toward her hold faults and toward those of others. At the age of 32, frustrated by her life as a gentlewoman, she found herself a position as Superintendent of a hospital for sick governesses. Additionally she cooperated with Sidney Herbert, a family friend who was by now a Cabinet minister, in several surveys of hospitals, examining defects in the working conditions of nurses.On the basis of this and related experience she was chosen, in 1854, to head up a party of nurses who would work in the hospital in Scutari, nurse wounded soldiers from the newly declared Crimean war. Her energy and enthusiasm for her task, the publicity which the clock gave to her work, the high regard in which she was held by the soldiers, and a national stir for a Nightingale fund that would be used to help embed training for nurses, all contributed to make FN a heroine.There was a huge declension in mortality rate, from 43% of the patients three months after she arrived in Scutari to 2% cardinal months afterward, that biographers prolong often attributed to her work. Upon her return to England at the end of July 1856 FN become abstruse in a series of investigations that sought to establish the reason for the huge death rate during the first winter of the war in the Crimea. Theories on the immediate cause abounded was it inadequate food, overwork, lack of shelter, or bad hygienics?In preparation for a promised Royal charge, she worked over the relevant information with Dr William Farr, who had the title Superintendent of the Statistical Department in the Registrar-Generals watch stunned. Farrs analysis persuaded her that the worst affects had been in Scutari, where overcrowding had added to the effect of poor sanitation. Sewers had been blocked, and the bivouac around had been fouled with corpses and excrement, matters that were fixed sooner the following winter. The major job had been specific to Scutari.FN did not dupe this information while she was in the Crimea. The info do however seem to be possessed of been readily available they were included in a report prepared by McNeill and Tulloch (1855). The strain of FNsvarious involvements, and peradventure residual effects from an illness that she had suffered while in the Crimea, in repayable course took their toll. A year after her return to England, she suffered a nauseating breakdown, emerging from this fictional characterl crisis with work outs that were often outstandingly different from those that she had held earlier.Of particular worry is a change from her demand that nurses should follow to the letter instructions from doctors, to her view that nurses ought, within their proper area of responsibility, to make their own autonomous judgments. broken (1998, pp. 119 127, 178) has extensive and perhaps overly speculative comment on the reasons for the sickish breakdown, and an interesting analysis of ways in which her views changed. The info that showed that the high mortality was specific to Scutari were included in FNs 1858 report, but omitted from the 1857-1858 Royal Commission report.It was feared that continuing and acrimonious attempts to assign blame would jeopardise ongoing efforts at army reform. FN, unhappy at this suppression of her evidence, sent copies of her report to a number of carefully chosen recipients, each time with instructions to prevail it confidential. One of the recipients was the freethinking popular journalist Harriet Martineau. With FNs help, she wrote a moderate (Martinueau 1859), ostensibly based on information from public documents but victimization FNs confidential report for additional background information, that gave the facts as FN unsounded them.FNs biographers, perhaps relying too much on official documents, hire not until recently been mindful of these nuances. See Small (1998, p. 198 200) for further intelligence is one of the first to recognise them. A comprehensive biography of FN, that bequeath do justice to the wide-ranging sympathies and interests of this remarkable woman and show how her views changed and authentic over time, has yet to be written. Small (see the note on his mesh site) and Baly (1997b, pp. 1-19) both draw attention to inaccuracies in earlier biographical accounts.Vicinus and Nergaard (1989) subscribe much carefully documented biographical information. Among the numerous web sites that have material on FN note C. J. McDonald (2001) who emphasises connections between Nightingale and the experiences of soldiers in the Vietnam war L. McDonald (2002) who is leading a project to publish all Nightingales writings and Small (1998). Smalls web site has the data (from Nightingale 1858) that the Royal Commission suppressed. 1. 2 Hospitals and Hospital care for FN had remarkably radical views on hospitals and on hospital nursing. Both in 860 and in 1876, she describes hospitals (Baly 1997b, p. 25 Nightingale 1876) as an intermediate stage of civilisation. In 1867 she wrot e (Baly 1997b, p. 21) my view you know is that the ultimate destination is the nursing of the sick in their own homes. I look to the abolition of all hospitals and workhouse infirmaries. But it is no use to talk about the year 2000. Consistent with these views, FNs Notes on Nursing (1859) are not intended as a manual to larn nurses to nurse, but are meant simply to give hints for thought to women who have personal charge of the health of others. It may thus seem teetotal that, in her work with the Nightingale fund, FN was deeply involved in the victimization of hospital nursing training. She opposed the British Nurses Associations 1890 proposals to make nursing into an accredited profession (Baly 1997b, pp. 184-196). She noted that there was no widespread agreement on what constituted an adequate training or what the minimum qualification should be, and argued that a much longer experience was needed before a register could be contemplated. The qualities that were required in nurses were not manipulable to test by public examination.FN did however see an important societal function for women aesculapian professionals. She wanted women to take leading roles in midwifery and in the diseases of women and children, and to be as well or better expert for these tasks as the men who at that time had a professional monopoly. It was her view that There is a better thing than making women into medical men, and that is making them into medical women (Nightingale 1871). She looked to a time when, as had happened in France, women would be professors of midwifery.She set out the immediate steps that she thought would best achieve that end. FN worked relentlessly for reform, in the army, in the hospitals, and in public health. She was meticulous in researching the reforms that she proposed. Where, as often, data were unavailable or inadequate, she pressed for their collection. Data inadequacies are strong themes in her Notes on Hospitals and in her Introductory N otes on Lying-In Institutions, i. e. , on maternal quality institutions. She made strong, consistent and carefully argued cases for enlightened and data-based public decision-making.This is not to say that FN was always correct in her judgments. In her next to last(a) contribution to the dialogue, FN comments on a controversy that erupted following the publication of the ternion edition of her Notes on Hospitals. Her use of the term mortality percent for deaths per hundred beds per day, which she copied from Farrs report as Registrar-General, was unfortunate. As she seems to admit a page later in the Notes, these figures were not a good basis for comparing the hygienical states of different hospitals.Florence NightingaleI was actually moved when Dr. Howe advised Florence that If you have a passion, the merely way to satisfy it is to pursue it. Yes, you ordain only be satisfied in your life when you pursue your passion on something because if not, you will only regret it and in the end you werent able to help other people as well as yourself. Florence sincerely did not neglect Gods call to her and this sincerely demonstrate the passionate side of her. Thanks to Dr. Howe, she found out that nursing is really her calling.I also admired Florences determination when she rejected Mr. Milnes and preferable to concentrate on her career. For me, to have a passion the same as her, marriage would really interfere with her ability to follow her calling. This is because it would really be difficult for Florence to manage a family when she is definitely drawn into helping other people. Florence is a good leader because she is understanding to the other nurses and all of them will really follow her orders.She is smart and knowledgeable in the proper health care. Florence has that magic in healing and also she has a strong persona when she is dealing with dying patients. Furthermore, who knew how much blemish there was against nurses before? It was really a terri ble prejudice, considering nurses as little more than hangers-on and the prejudice in the army was shocking. The head doctors would prefer to see soldiers die than let the nurses trained by Florence work in the military hospitals.Compared to nowadays, nurses are really well-thought-of and honoured because of the love and care they give to their patients. It is good to be reminded of the damages prejudice can cause and just how powerful it is as a social force The film was outstanding for me. The portrayal and the flow of the story were good. Jaclyn smith was very good as Florence Nightingale. And the film really showed the complete feature of Florence Nightingales works in the field of nursing.