Florence Nightingale 1872 Engraving Nurse Hospital

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FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE Original 1872 engraving "Florence Nightingale" with facsimile signature, hand colored. this 134 year old engraving is in very good condition. Overall size 11" X 8". Engraving is dated in lower margin. Hand colored engravings of Miss Nightingale are scarce. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE Florence Nightingale, OM (12 May 1820 Â- 13 August 1910), who came to be known as The Lady with the Lamp, was a pioneer of modern nursing, and a noted statistician. Inspired by what she took as a divine calling, experienced first in 1837 at Embley Park and later throughout her life, Nightingale commited herself to nursing. This demonstrated a passion on her part, and also a rebellion against the expected role for a woman of her status, which was to become an obedient wife. In those days, nursing was a career with a poor reputation, filled mostly by poorer women, "hangers-on" who followed the armies. In fact, nurses were equally likely to function as cooks. Nightingale announced her decision to enter nursing in 1845, evoking intense anger and distress from her family, particularly her mother. Nightingale was particularly concerned with the appalling conditions of medical care for poor and indigent people. In December 1844, in response to a pauper's death in a workhouse infirmary in London that became a public scandal, she became the leading advocate for improved medical care in the infirmaries and immediately engaged the support of Charles Villiers, then president of the Poor Law Board. This led to her active role in the reform of the Poor Laws, extending far beyond the provision of medical care. Nightingale's career in nursing began in earnest in 1851 when she received four months' training in Germany as a deaconess of Kaiserswerth. She undertook the training over strenuous family objections concerning the risks and social implications of such activity, and the Roman Catholic foundations of the hospital. While at Kaiserswerth, she reported having her most important intense and compelling experience of her divine calling. Crimean War Florence Nightingale's most famous contribution came during the Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports began to filter back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. On October 21, 1854, she and a staff of 38 women volunteer nurses, trained by Nightingale and including her aunt Mai Smith, were sent (under the authorization of Sidney Herbert) to Turkey, some 545 km across the Black Sea from Balaklava in the Crimea, w the main British camp was based. Nightingale arrived early in November 1854 in Scutari (modern-day Üsküdar in Istanbul). She and her nurses found wounded soldiers being badly cared for by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference. Medicines were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were common, many of them fatal. T was no equipment to process food for the patients. Nightingale and her compatriots began by thoroughly cleaning the hospital and equipment and reorganizing patient care. However, during her time at Scutari, the death rate did not drop; on the contrary, it began to rise. The death count would be highest of all other hospitals in the region. During her first winter at Scutari, 4077 soldiers died t Ten times more soldiers died from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. Conditions at the hospital were so fatal to the patients because of overcrowding and the hospital's defective sewers and lack of ventilation. A sanitary commission had to be sent out by the British government to Scutari in March 1855, almost six months after Florence Nightingale had arrived, which flushed out the sewers and improved ventilation. Death rates were sharply reduced. Nightingale continued believing the death rates were due to poor nutrition and supplies and overworking of the soldiers. It was not until after she returned to Britain and began collecti... read more

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