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ACTIVITY : 2.1 Talking and sharing information Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale was born in Italy in 1820 in the town of Florence, from where she received her first name. Her parents were English, and her childhood was spent in England, chiefly in the Derbyshire countryside. She was not a very sociable child and she did not easily make friends with other children about her own age, but it has been said that she showed an early concern for the maimed and the sick. It was the custom in those days for the daughters of the aristocracy and the gentry to be taken to London by their parents when they were about eighteen years old to be presented to the Queen. They would then be expected to stay on in London for some onths with their mothers, following a very full programme of parties and balls which marked the entry of these girls, debutantes as they were called, into the world of society.

Miss Nightingale, in her turn, was duly presented at Court, and attended the danced which her mother, and the mothers of other young debutantes, arranged. But during daytime, she shocked her parents and contemporaries by insisting on visiting hospitals, schools for the poor, and charitable institutions to see for herself what was being done for the sick and the outcast. In the following months, while the other young ladies were meeting the young gentlemen whom their parents hoped, would make them suitable husbands, Miss Nightingale was visiting France and Germany, where the standard of hospital nursing was, at that time, much higher than in England. She first went through a course in hospital management at an Institute of Protestant Deaconesses in Germany and, after six months, moved to Paris, where she studied the system of nursing in the hospitals run by the sisters of the Order of Saint Vincent de Paul. When she came back to England, she used her recently acquired knowledge and skill to reorganize a sanatorium in London, where she not only improved the standard of nursing, but also, over the years, put the finances of the institution on to a firm footing. On 13 August 1910, at the age of 90, she died peacefully in her sleep in her room at 10 South Street, Park Lane. The offer of burial in Westminster Abbey was declined by her relatives, and she is buried in the graveyard at St. Margaret Church in East Wellow, Hampshire. She left a large body of work, including several hundred notes which were previously unpublished.