Nightingale decided to use the money to further her cause. The previous year, Queen Victoria had rewarded Nightingale's work by presenting her with an engraved brooch that came to be known as the 'Nightingale Jewel' and by granting her a prize of $250,000 from the British government. To her surprise she was met with a hero's welcome, which the humble nurse did her best to avoid. She left in the summer of 1856, once the Crimean conflict was resolved, and returned to her childhood home at Lea Hurst. Nightingale remained at Scutari for a year and a half.

After the Battle of Alma, England was in an uproar about the neglect of their ill and injured soldiers, who not only lacked sufficient medical attention due to hospitals being horribly understaffed but also languished in appallingly unsanitary conditions. By 1854, no fewer than 18,000 soldiers had been admitted into military hospitals.Īt the time, there were no female nurses stationed at hospitals in the Crimea. Thousands of British soldiers were sent to the Black Sea, where supplies quickly dwindled. Allied British and French forces were at war against the Russian Empire for control of Ottoman territory. In October 1853, the Crimean War broke out. Nightingale made it her mission to improve hygiene practices, significantly lowering the death rate at the hospital in the process. Nightingale also volunteered at the Middlesex Hospital around this time, grappling with a cholera outbreak and unsanitary conditions conducive to the rapid spread of the disease. Her performance there so impressed her employer that Nightingale was promoted to superintendent. In the early 1850s, Nightingale returned to London, where she took a nursing job in a Harley Street hospital for ailing governesses. During the Victorian Era, where English women had almost no property rights, a young lady of Nightingale's social stature was expected to marry a man of means to ensure her class standing-not take up a job that was viewed by the upper social classes as lowly menial labor.

When Nightingale approached her parents and told them about her ambitions to become a nurse, they were not pleased and forbade her to pursue appropriate training. Nightingale eventually came to the conclusion that nursing was her calling she believed the vocation to be her divine purpose. Nightingale was provided with a classical education, including studies in mathematics along with German, French and Italian.įrom a young age, Nightingale was active in philanthropy, ministering to the ill and poor people in the village neighboring her family’s estate. Nightingale's father was William Edward Nightingale (having changed his original surname, 'Shore'), a wealthy landowner who would be associated with two estates-one at Lea Hurst, Derbyshire, and the other at Embly, Hampshire. “All churches are, of course, only more or less unsuccessful attempts to represent the unseen to the mind.” “What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine.” “I use the word nursing for want of a better.” “Such education in women would indeed diminish the doctor's work-but no one really believes that doctors wish that there should be more illness, in order to have more work.” “It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm.” “Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization, never intended at all even to take in the whole sick population.” “I think one's feelings waste themselves in words they ought all to be distilled into actions, and into actions which bring results.” “I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse.” “Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.” “Nursing in an art and if it is to be made an art, it requires as exclusive a devotion, as hard a preparation, as any painter’s or sculptor’s work.”

Nightingale nursing