Florence Nightingale.

Dear Friends

Happy Evening

Today is International Nurses Day.

It is celebrated to honour Florence Nightingale.

Florence Nightingale was born on 12 May 1820

into a wealthy and well-connected British family

at the Villa Colombia, in Florence, Tuscany, Italy,

and was named after the city of her birth. 

Florence inherited a liberal-humanitarian outlook

from both sides of her family. 

She was a British social reformer and statistician,

and the founder of modern nursing.

Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a

manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War,

in which she organised care for wounded soldiers.

 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,

and is now part of King's College London.

In recognition of her pioneering work in nursing,

the Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses,

and the Florence Nightingale Medal,

the highest international distinction a nurse can achieve,

were named in her honour, and the annual

International Nurses Day is celebrated on her birthday.

Her social reforms included improving healthcare for

all sections of British society, advocating better

hunger relief in India, helping to abolish prostitution laws

that were harsh for women, and expanding the

acceptable forms of female participation in the workforce.

Nightingale was a prodigious and versatile writer.

In her lifetime, much of her published work was

concerned with spreading medical knowledge.

Some of her tracts were written in simple English

so that they could easily be understood by those with poor

literacy skills. She was also a pioneer in data visualization

with the use of infographics, effectively using

graphical presentations of statistical data. 

Friends let us applaud the service rendered by her

for the welfare if humanity

Kind Regards