Crimean War - Florence Nightingale

A celebrated English nurse, writer and statistician, Florence Nightingale was one of the first western female nurses who tended to wounded soldiers. She and a staff of 38 women volunteer nurses, trained by Nightingale were sent to the Ottoman Empire. Wounded in the Crimean battles soldiers were sent to Barrack Hospital in Scutari (modern-day Üsküdar in Istanbul) for proper medical help. Nightingale and the nurses quartered at Selimiye Barracks to take care of the wounded British soldiers of the Barrack Hospital.  

She and her nurses found wounded soldiers being badly cared for by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference. Medicines were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were common, many of them fatal.

Visiting Crimea. In middle of May 1855 Florence arrived to Balaclava. Soon after her arrival, on May 24 she became ill with “Crimean Fever”. Her doctors insisted on her going home. In the end of May 1855 she was sent back to Scutari.

Miss Nightingale returned to the Crimea in October 1855, after fall of Sevastopol.  There was peace from fighting and no more battles were to be fought. When they entered the hospital wards and cellars of Sevastopol they found bodies of unburied soldiers. The ones that were alive had maggots crawling through their wounds, the smell was indescribable.

In November 1855 there was an outbreak of cholera at Scutari, and Miss Nightingale returned to Turkey. Soldiers, nurses and surgeons were dying. The pressure of administrative work had forced her to virtually give up practical nursing.

It was asserted that Nightingale reduced the death rate by making improvements in hygiene herself or by calling for the Sanitary Commission.  Initially Nightingale believed that the death rates were due to poor nutrition and supplies and overworking of the soldiers. It was not until after she returned to Britain and began collecting evidence before the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army that she came to believe that most of the soldiers at the hospital were killed by poor living conditions. This experience influenced her later career, when she advocated sanitary living conditions as of great importance.

 

During the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale gained the nickname "The Lady with the Lamp", deriving from a phrase in a report in The Times:

She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.