WILFUL, WONDERFUL WOMEN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 87, 14 April 1931, Page 6

WILFUL, WONDERFUL WOMEN.

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. (Copyrighted.) Among the many notable British men and women whose achievements have mad© their names household words throughout the civilised world there is none better known nor more revered than the name of Florence Nightingale, who consecrated practically the whole of her lengthy life of ninety years to the cause of suffering humanity. ' She gained a world-wide celebrity as a result of her successful labours during the progress of the Crimean War, but this formed but a small portion of her life's work, for, from early youth to old age, she never ceased her activities for the good of others. As a child she ministered to the sick in the vicinity of her home, as a young woman she renounced the society and the enjoyments of her friends to devote herself to the reforming of the nursing profession, and in later years she directed her beneficences from the bed to which her frequent spells of ill-health confined her.

She derived her Christian name from the Italian city of Florence, where she was born in 1820, and her childhood was spent in the luxurious Derbyshire and Devonshire homes of her father, a wealthy English gentleman. Her decision to become a nurse was largely influenced by the example of Elizabeth Fry, whom she met when that noble woman's work among the female prisoners of England was fast growing to a close, and, after making a tour through Europe, for the purpose of studying the methods of the various civil and military hospitals, a course of training in Paris arid in Germany equipped her with the knowledge and experience to successfully undertake the reorganisation of a sanatorium soon after her return to England. In the early days of the Crimean War the British nation was agitated by the reports of the terrible sufferings of the sick and wounded soldiers at the front, and Miss Nightingale was one of the first to volunteer her services when the Government issued an appeal for trained nurses. She was given a free hand in the work of organisation, and on October 27, 1854, she left England with the first detachment of thirty-seven nurses, many of whom were ladies of gentle birth like herself. On her arrival in the Crimea she found that practically no provision had been made for the care of soldiers incapacitated by disease and wounds, but, taking full advantage of her plenary powers, and despite the objections of medical officers to the presence of women helpers, she speedily turned chaos into order, and in a short time reduced the death rate from fifty down to two per cent. She refused to quit her post until the last of her charges had. embarked for home at the end of the war, although her strenuous labours and worries had undermined her health, and she never afterwards regained her strength, remaining an invalid more or less for the rest of her life, but this weakness did not prevent her from inaugurating arid supervising many important and far-reaching reforms in connection with nursing, sanitation and general hospital routine, on which subjects she wrote a number of invaluable works. One of her books, "Notes on Hospitals," was adopted by architects, engineers and medical officers as a guide in building and equipping an ideal hospital, while another, "Notes on Nursing," gave a stimulus to the study of the subject throughout the world. Until the end of her life she was consulted by the British Government on hospital and army matters, while her advice was sought by interested foreign Governments during the progress of the American Civil and the Franco-German Wars. Prior to the middle of last century the majority of nurses were of the Sairey Gamp type, but the self-sacrificing example and remarkable success of Florence Nightingale were responsible for numerous other ladies of gentle birth adopting scientific nursing as their life's work, with the result that the profession has ever since attracted to its ranko some of the best and noblest of our womankind.