Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was born into a wealthy English family. She believed that God had called her to abandon her life of luxury to serve others. She received a classical education focused on the humanities but developed an early interest in medicine when she saw the deplorable conditions in many of the English hospitals. She decided to become a nurse and when war broke out between Russia and England in 1854 she went to Crimea to volunteer her services, taking 38 nurses with her. Before she arrived the death rate in the filthy hospitals, which crawled with vermin and disease, was nearly fifty percent. Her valiant efforts to make the facilities clean and the environment conducive to healing resulted in a death rate of less than five percent. The stories of her courage on the battlefront, the successes she achieved as a care provider, the difficulties she had with inept and jealous doctors, and the Crimean fever that nearly killed her made her an international heroine. Nicknamed “the Lady with the Lamp” for her habit of checking on soldiers late into the night, her popularity inspired health care changes around the world. Thousands sent her contributions to help with her work, money she used to build a school for nurses at King’s College after the war. Although an invalid during the last forty years of her life, she wrote extensively about nursing and was a tireless champion for hospital reform. She was a world-renowned figure whose selfless life influenced the work of many Christian social activists.
