Opinion: Florence Nightingale in the age of Covid-19
Last May marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale. That her bicentennial fell during a worldwide pandemic is both illuminating and ironic. Nightingale’s experience as a nurse during the Crimean War in the mid-1850s led her to three insights that came to define her professional life, insights as revolutionary as they were unpopular:
- Medical care has the potential to do harm.
- Nurses require stringent and scientific training
- Medical care does not exist in a vacuum from the world around it.
Nightingale is best known for her work illustrating the first two tenets. When she arrived at the British military hospital in the Scutari region of the Ottoman empire in November 1854, a year after the war had begun, she was horrified to learn that far more soldiers were dying of infection and poor medical care than were dying on the battlefield. Her rigorous reforms of the wretched medical conditions — reforms which rankled the military higher-ups — slashed the hospital mortality rate from 33% to 2% over the course of a single year.
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