About Florence Nightingale - Research Paper Example

May 18, Florence Nightingale The popular perception of Florence Nightingale as a romantic heroine ignores her achievements as an educationist. The Nightingale legend nevertheless had an educational impact. It popularized nurse training, which led to the establishment of a new profession for women. While the legend has remained an important part of nursing culture worldwide, it has served to hinder a deeper understanding of Florence Nightingale. Florence Nightingale rose to fame for nursing the sick and wounded during the Crimean War (1854–56).

After the war, she might have taken a high-profile post as a hospital matron and superintendent of nurse training. Instead, she retired from public life to use her influence to campaign and promote educational schemes. Her impact was probably greater for choosing to influence policy rather than exercising power. Florence Nightingale wrote 200 books, reports and pamphlets after the Crimean War, which had a profound effect on army health, welfare in India, civil hospitals, medical statistics and nursing.

Her greatest educational contributions were in the establishment of new institutions for the training of army doctors and hospital nurses, but some of her lesser-known educational schemes are illuminating. Florence Nightingale has been studied as a reformer, statistician, administrator and researcher, but studies of her impact on education have remained limited. The main history of Nightingale nurse training (Baly, 1986) ignores the broader context of Florence Nightingale’s educational views to focus on the often fraught administrative history of the early Nightingale School for nurses.

It is not surprising that there should exist many common threads uniting the various aspects of education with which Florence Nightingale was involved. Her own education and training had no outlet until the age of 31. She felt driven to make some practical use of her education and, consequently, her early letters, notes and booklets continually refer to the purposes of education and criticize the education available to women in her age. Taking these early writings and her later promotion of training schemes, it is possible to claim that Florence Nightingale was a great, if unrecognized, educationist.

References Baly, M.E. 1986. Florence Nightingale and the nursing legacy. Beckenham, U.K., Croom Helm. British Broadcasting Corporation, http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/famouspeople/standard/nightingale/learn/page03.shtml#focus Calabria, M. 1994. Florence Nightingale and the libraries of the British Army. Libraries and culture (Austin, TX), vol. 29, no. 4, p. 367-88.