Thousands of British soldiers were sent to the Black Sea, where supplies quickly dwindled. The British Empire was at war against the Russian Empire for control of the Ottoman Empire. In October of 1853, the Crimean War broke out. She had just barely recovered when the biggest challenge of her nursing career presented itself. Nightingale made it her mission to improve hygiene practices, significantly lowering the death rate at the hospital in the process. The position proved challenging as Nightingale grappled 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 the superintendent within just a year of being hired. In the early 1850s, Nightingale returned to London, where she took a nursing job in a Middlesex hospital for ailing governesses. Nightingale explained her reason for turning him down, saying that while he stimulated her intellectually and romantically, her “moral…active nature…requires satisfaction, and that would not find it in this life.” Determined to pursue her true calling despite her parents’ objections, in 1844, Nightingale enrolled as a nursing student at the Lutheran Hospital of Pastor Fliedner in Kaiserwerth, Germany. When Nightingale was 17 years old, she refused a marriage proposal from a “suitable” gentleman, Richard Monckton Milnes. During the Victorian Era, a young lady of Nightingale’s social stature was expected to marry a man of means-not take up a job that was viewed as lowly menial labor by the upper social classes. In fact, her parents forbade her to pursue nursing. When Nightingale approached her parents and told them about her ambitions to become a nurse, they were not pleased. She believed it to be her divine purpose. By the time she was 16 years old, it was clear to her that nursing was her calling. Florence was raised on the family estate at Lea Hurst, where her father provided her with a classical education, including studies in German, French and Italian.įrom a very young age, Florence Nightingale was active in philanthropy, ministering to the ill and poor people in the village neighboring her family’s estate. Florence’s father was William Shore Nightingale, a wealthy landowner who had inherited two estates-one at Lea Hurst, Derbyshire, and the other in Hampshire, Embley Park-when Florence was five years old.
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