Florence Nightingale

choi

Victoria Sweet, Far More Than a Lady With a Lamp; Florence Nightingale remains relevant long after her death. New York Times, Mar 4, 2014.
www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/healt ... ingales-wisdom.html

Note:
(a) "I was practicing medicine in an old-fashioned hospital in San Francisco and learned that its comfortable open wards were 'Nightingale wards' * * * What I learned [about the ward] is that after the Crimean War from 1853 to 1856, in which thousands of British soldiers died from infections, Nightingale visited almost every hospital in Europe, analyzed them and then wrote up her findings in 'Notes on Hospitals,' which became the guide to hospital architecture for the next century. Its first sentences changed my idea of Florence Nightingale forever: 'It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm. It is quite necessary, nevertheless, to lay down such a principle.'”
(i)
(A) common nightingale
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Nightingale
(Luscinia megarhynchos; slightly larger than the European Robin, at 15–16.5 cm length; The song of the Nightingale has been described as one of the most beautiful sounds in nature; Early writers assumed the female sang when it is in fact the male)
(B) nightingale (n; Middle English, alteration of Old English [used by Anglo-Saxons] nihtegale, from niht + galan to sing):
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nightingale
(ii) Florence Nightingale
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale
(1820-1910 [age 90]; born into a rich, upper-class, well-connected British family in Florence, Italy, and was named after the city of her birth; Nightingale was educated mainly by her father; Nightingale underwent the first of several experiences that she believed were calls from God in 1837, prompting a strong desire to devote her life to the service of others; never married)
(iii) Nightingale ward
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightingale_ward
(one large room without subdivisions)
(iv) Florence Nightingale, Notes on Hospitals. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1863. (The name of publisher is long.)

She also wrote
Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing; What it is, and what it is not. London: Harrison and Sons, 1859.
(v) Hippocratic Oath
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath
(written in late 5th century BC; section 2 Oath English Translation: "I will * * * never do harm to anyone")

(b) "Then I got to the end of the book [Notes on Hospitals], where Nightingale lays out one of the first sets of hospital mortality statistics collected. Statistics had recently been applied to social phenomena by Adolphe Quetelet, and Nightingale was taken by them. 'To understand God’s thought, we must study statistics,' she wrote. And to display her evidence, she came up with the polar pie chart, a visual way of understanding data we still use. It was that appendix which gave me the first inkling that this was a brilliant woman. How did I get her so wrong?

(ii) pie chart
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_chart
(section 3.2 Polar area diagram)

The Nightingale diagram in the section has a legend, from Ms Nightingale herself, that mention “zymotic diseases.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zymotic_disease

The term is antiquated.

(c) “When she was born there was no anesthesia and no antisepsis, hardly a thermometer, and no oxygen, IVs or antibiotics. The best surgeon was whoever could amputate a leg in less than 90 seconds; appendicitis often meant death. By the time she died there was germ theory, the laboratory and vaccines against cholera, typhoid and plague. So she lived through a revolution in health care.
(i) anesthesia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anesthesia
(section 5 History)

* William Thomas Green Morton (1819 – 1868; a Boston dentist who first publicly demonstrated the use of inhaled ether as a surgical anesthetic in 1846)
The Ether Dome still stands in Massachusetts General Hospital.
(ii) “The widespread introduction of antiseptic surgical methods followed the publishing of the paper Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery in 1867 by Joseph Lister [an English surgeon], inspired by Louis Pasteur's germ theory of putrefaction. In this paper, Lister advocated the use of carbolic acid (phenol) as a method of ensuring that any germs present were killed.”   Wikipedia

* Joseph Lister, Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery. Lancet, 90: 353-356 (1867).
www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(02)51827-4/fulltext
(iii) cholera vaccine
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholera_vaccine
("The first vaccines used against cholera were developed in the late nineteenth century. These injected whole cell vaccine became increasingly popular until they were replaced by oral vaccines starting in the 1980s. Both oral and injectable forms are about 50-60% effective in the first year")
(iv) Briton "Almroth Edward Wright developed an effective inactivated whole-cell typhoid vaccine that was introduced in 1896. Due to side-effects its usage was eventually discontinued."

* But we all know now that for bacterial diseases such as cholera and typhoid, prevention--public health, namely--is preferable to and better than treatment.

(d) “she [Nightingale] took over a hospital on Harley Street where she put her ideas into practice. Then came the Crimean War. It was the first war with correspondents at the front, and they reported on the thousands of soldiers dying at hospitals from typhoid fever, cholera and dysentery. Nightingale, whose work was well known by then, was asked to go to the Crimean Peninsula. What she saw there — the filth, the lack of food, bandages, even latrines — stunned her, scarred her and energized her for the rest of her life. In that uncaring chaos, she had a vision of its opposite, of how things could be — shining hospitals with professional nurses and medical care for everyone, especially the poor, ‘who, when they are sick, become our brothers.’”

Harley Street
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harley_Street
(Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (1689-1741))

(e) “She wrote ‘Notes on Nursing,’ which became a best seller and made her financially independent. She reorganized Britain’s army hospitals and reformed the nursing in workhouses. She founded the first real school for nurses, and its graduates — ‘Nightingales’— carried her reformation throughout the world. She wrote on public health, sanitation, India and prostitution, and for 50 years she was behind most of the health-related legislation in England. All this even though she was bedridden from chronic brucellosis, an infection she’d contracted in Crimea.:
(i) “In 1860, Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London. It was the first secular nursing school in the world, now part of King's College London.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale
(ii) workhouse (n): “historical (In the UK) a public institution in which the destitute of a parish received board and lodging in return for work”
www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/de ... n_english/workhouse