Florence Nightingale's Influence on the Role of Nursing

Medicine has come a long way from its origin in ancient times. As humanity and society has evolved, so has our knowledge in medicine and medical practices. Over the past few centuries, a tremendous amount of medical discoveries, vaccinations and cures, and medical breakthroughs have been accomplished. Discoveries throughout the ages have influenced and contributed to the improvement of today’s health care.

Nursing over the years has greatly evolved from caring for the sick in wars, to homes, churches, into hospitals with these changes women have been transformed from uneducated, underprivileged to being valued professions. Florence Nightingale changed nursing for good, it became a real profession with strict principles and standards.

The word nursing gets its significance from the Latin word ‘nutricius’ which means supporting. Along these lines, in the Old World, nursing was seen as a job of thinking about the family and not a calling. On the planet history of nursing, roots can be followed to religion, folklore, and Eastern and Western social orders. The old Egyptians used maybe the principal formal medical attendants, recruiting them to aid labor. It is from these beginnings that the present birthing specialists advanced. Among the Greeks and Romans, it was accepted that divine beings and goddesses impacted mending. There was a god for pretty much every human organic capacity. The ladies of the group of Asklepios were fanciful medical attendants. The world's history of nursing records Hygeia similar to the goddess of wellbeing. In the Roman Empire, Roman aristocrats thought about the wiped out. In ancient civilizations, Egyptians were the first people to record health records and preserve dead bodies. Then the Chinese practiced curing the spirit and nourishing the body. After that the Greeks were the first to believe that illness is a disease of natural causes and they understand nutrition and cleanliness. Finally came to Romans whom established the first hospitals and built aqueducts and sewers to maintain health. During the Dark Ages which was in 400-800 A.D., Vesalius published his findings on the anatomy of a human, in ‘De Fabrica Corporis Humani’. Additionally, during the Renaissance Paracelsus was a Swiss alchemist and physician, who lived during the Renaissance. He used mineral and chemical remedies and even used mercury to treat syphilis. He wrote a book ‘Onte Miners' Sickness and Other Diseases of Miners’ and Girolamo Fracastoro was an Italian physician, who created the name syphilis. He proposed that the disease was spread from person-to-person contact, by tiny 'disease seeds' or spores that could travel far. His theories had influence over society for centuries to come. Finally in the 16th century, French surgeon, Ambroise Paré translated Vesalius' work to improve battlefield medicine. He sewed wounds rother and replaced boiling oil used to cauterize gunshot wounds with egg yolk or oil of rose. After this in the 17th century is when Nightingale changed the nursing world forever.

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Florence Nightingale was born on the 12th day of May the year 1820 as a second child names after the city in Italy. Her parents, William and Frances songbird were wealthy and regarded residents of the England. William Nightingale had even challenged for a political situation sooner or later in his life however lost. Florence started indicating a great deal of enthusiasm for scholarly things from a prior age in her life. Florence started demonstrating an intrigue and enthusiasm for the poor and enduring regardless of living in a well-off family. Florence began showing an interest and passion for the needy and suffering despite living in a wealthy family. However, when she came of age, all her family wanted her to do was to find a respectable man to marry her, she knew that being a mother and wife would never be enough so she had an idea of doing something more than that. At that time nurses got no training at all, but she had other ideas. She would always read and stuck to her books refining her ideas to how she would help teach nurses how to help the sick. Finally, she was asked to train a team of nurses for work in the Crimea, where a war had struck.

There was a hospital there in the battlefield where injured soldiers would be brought in, but rarely getting better. She trained her nurses in fundamental principles of cleanliness and hygiene, neat and orderly. She then went to the journey. In the workspace soldiers lay on the floor in a pool of their blood, wounds not covered up with flies on them, sheets would crawl with lice and magots, it was like hell on Earth for her, however she tried to persuade the head doctor to let her help and get to work, but he resisted. Things got so bad that he was willing let her try. This was when it was her chance to prove her first principles of nursing, cleanliness and hygiene. Nurses cleaned every corner of place, believing that when injured came, they should expect good food, clean surface area and clean sheets and fresh air. The rest of the nurses and herself cleaned the whole place and started their work. She really took care of the injured soldiers in a humane way. As a human to another human, she would sit with them if they wanted, read to them or take their hand id they called out. Soldiers that would have died before were getting better, this was the greatest award for her. After the war ended, she stayed until every last soldier was well enough to leave, she showed compassion to the soldiers, empathy and true care.

The role of nursing was greatly influenced by the work of Florence Nightingale. Because of Nightingale's examination the nursing calling has taken gigantic steps toward improving patient consideration, hence yielding most extreme recuperating ability and diminished death rates. At the time England as a country was able to regain some men from the war and regain its strength all thanks to the care of Nightingale and her efforts during this war.