Florence Nightingale

Eschewing the upper-class British life into which she’d been born,

Florence Nightingale became a nurse on the front lines of war,

advocated for improved sanitation in hospitals, and started the world’s

first official training program for nurses.

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A woman born into a wealthy, upper-class British home in the early 1800s was supposed
to do just one thing: become the wife of a wealthy, upper-class man.
But, Florence Nightingale had other ideas. Her father had taught her advanced
mathematics, so young Florence knew she had a good brain. To Florence, the
comfortable lives of the wealthy women around her seemed shallow. She felt she was
destined for something more worthwhile.
At age seventeen, Florence announced that she had found her calling in life - she wanted
to become a nurse. Her mother and sister were horrified. Wealthy young women of that
time simply did not work, and certainly avoided all contact with “the lower classes.”
It took a lot of strength of character for Nightingale to go against the conventions of the
day and the wishes of her family. But she persisted, working hard to study nursing, and
traveling around Europe and the Middle East to broaden her education.
Other wealthy English people thought she was eccentric or shameful, but the Crimean
War changed everything and made Florence Nightingale a national heroine.
The war involving the British, Russian, French, and Ottoman empires created terrible
conditions for wounded soldiers. There was little medicine, a scarcity of trained doctors,