Nursing Leader: Florence Nightingale

This is a series of post regarding notable nursing leaders who have given many contribution to nursing and their influence uplifted the nursing profession.

Nursing Leaders

Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, Lillian Wald, Lavinia Dock, Margaret Sanger, and Mary Breckinridge are among the leaders who have made notable contributions both to nursing's history and to women's history. These women were all politically astute pioneers. Their skills at influencing others and bringing about change remain models for political nurse activists today. Contemporary nursing leaders, such as Virginia Henderson, who created a modern worldwide definition of nursing, and Martha Rogers, a catalyst for theory  development.

Nightingale (1820-1910)

Florence Nightingale's contributions to nursing are well documented. Her achievements in improving the standards for the care of war casualties in the Crimea earned her the title "Lady with the Lamp." Her efforts in reforming hospitals and in producing and implementing public health policies also made her an accomplished political nurse: She was the first nurse to exert political pressure on government. Through her contributions to nursing education—perhaps her greatest achievement—she is also recognized as nursing's first scientist-theorist for her work Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not (1860/1969).

She was born to a wealthy and intellectual family. She believed she was "called by God to help others . . . [and] to improve the well-being of mankind" (Schuyler, 1992, p. 4). She was determined to become a nurse

in spite of opposition from her family and the restrictive societal code for affluent young English women. As a well-traveled young woman of the day, she visited Kaiserswerth in 1847, where she received 3 months' training in nursing. In 1853 she studied in Paris with the Sisters of Charity, after which she returned to England to assume the position of superintendent of a charity hospital for ill governesses.

When she returned to England from the Crimea, a grateful English public gave Nightingale an honorarium of £4500. She later used this money to develop the Nightingale Training School for Nurses, which opened in 1860. The school served as a model for other training schools. Its graduates traveled to other countries to manage hospitals and institute nurse-training programs.

Nightingale's vision of nursing, which included public health and health promotion roles for nurses, was only partially addressed in the early days of nursing. The focus tended to be  on developing the profession within hospitals.