Happy 200th Birthday Florence Nightingale!
/Here are five fun facts about Florence Nightingale, and how you can celebrate her birthday!
Florence Nightingale was born 200 years ago, on May 12, 1820.
Florence Nightingale died on August 13, 1910. She contracted an illness, probably from drinking contaminated goat’s milk, while serving as a nurse in the Crimean War in the 1850’s. Florence left for war a lovely young woman, then suffered the rest of her life with severe sciatica, dysentery, rheumatism, earache, continual laryngitis, insomnia, and obsession.
She was mostly bedridden the rest of her life, yet wrote over 200 books, letters, articles, and pamphlets pushing for proper sanitation in hospitals.
In honor of Florence Nightingale’s years of writing while ill, lay on the couch and write a letter to someone you care about.
2. Florence Nightingale’s birthday is celebrated as International Nurses Day.
an admiring soldier sketched this. Florence Nightingale never married.
Her family was rich; she should have grown up to be a proper English Victorian lady. But Florence wanted to serve as a nurse. Her mother and older sister were horrified.
Florence studied nursing in Germany, then when Crimean War broke out, she trained 38 English nurses to join her in a field hospital, fighting for new standards in cleanliness among the soldiers.
Upon her return to London, England, she established the first secular nursing school in the world.
Look up the Crimean War. Who fought it? Why? Where? Marvel at the distance Florence Nightingale traveled to help.
She carried Athena around in her pocket!
3. Florence Nightingale was named after the city she was born in. So was her sister.
Florence is a city in Italy. Her sister’s middle name, Parthenope, is a Greek settlement in Italy.
When Florence was traveling around Europe as a young adult, she rescued a little owl from a group of children who were tormenting it. She named the owl Athena. Can you guess where she was when she adopted the owl? Yup - Athens, Greece.
Spend Florence Nightingale’s birthday calling your family members not by their names, but by where they were born! In my house, my name would be Anaheim, my husband’s Pasadena, and my two daughters would have the same name, so I’ll call the older one San, and the younger one Diego.
4. Florence Nightingale liked data.
Her attention to detail and tireless documentation of the patients she attended to as a nurse in the Crimean war that gave her the data she needed to convince the public that clean hospitals prevent disease.
Florence tried publishing bar graphs, but she felt that the general public didn’t bother to look at graphs. And she wanted to influence the public that keeping clean keeps away many diseases.
So she modified a pie chart into what is now known as a Nightingale rose. Her graphics helped attract and hold attention. She even put her mortality diagrams in picture frames and sent them to influential people, and commanded they be hung in their offices for all the public to see.
She was the first woman elected to the Royal Statistical Society and and was an Honorary Member of the American Statistical Association.
Celebrate Florence Nightingale’s birthday by bringing roses home, or by baking a pie in memory of Florence Nightingale’s influential diagrams.
On the right, blue deaths by preventable disease. on the left, after sanitation practices, blue deaths by preventable disease is dramatically less.
5. Florence Nightingale is known as the Lady with the Lamp.
Soldiers wrote home about Florence’s care, and the newspapers spread her fame. It’s nice to know that her good work was noticed and appreciated!
Light a candle in her honor. Notice and appreciate someone you love!
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