Historical Figures of Nursing

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Historical Figures of Nursing
Diane Eugenio
NUR/391
January 20, 2013
Tricia Proctor

Historical Figures of Nursing
Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton were two intelligent, dedicated, and brave women who gained worldwide adulation (Spiegel, 1995, p. 501) and helped advance the practice of modern day nursing. Nightingale, using statistics, decreased the amount of soldiers’ deaths due to infection during the Crimean War and created a system of training nurses that would lead to them being considered “professional” for the first time. Clara Barton “embarked on a lengthy struggle to found the American Red Cross” (Spiegel, p. 501), which to this day gives aid and comfort following calamities throughout the world.
Florence Nightingale came from an upper class family in England. She was well-educated, after completing her studies in math, natural science, Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian, and ancient and modern literature (Egenes, 2009, p. 4). She was expected to marry and have children, but instead believed she had been chosen to devote her life to the service of humanity. She traveled to Germany to be trained by Pastor Theodor Fleidner,. He and his wife had established the Pastor Fleidner’s Deaconess Home and Hospital at Kaiserswerth, primarily for the training of nursing. Florence spent three years under their tutelage, then returned to Britain and was appointed superintendent of a hospital. Next she went to Paris to observe the Catholic Sisters of Charity at work. During that time, she volunteered as a nurse at the Middlesex Hospital during an outbreak of cholera (Egenes, p. 5).
The Crimean War began in 1854. British troops were dying at a rate of about 43%. Nightingale used the statistics she had learned and could discern that the British soldiers were not dying from their wounds, but from disease. (She believed that dirt, not bacteria,
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