Personality and Work of Florence Nightingale - Essay Example

As a function of her tireless campaigning and efforts to better to plight of humanity in all situations in which she worked, the causes of feminism, poverty, and a litany of other socially conscious actions were undertaken.  As a function of understanding these contributions, this brief paper will seek to categorize and elaborate on but a few of the contributions to the field of nursing that Florence Nightingale has affected.

After her rise to notoriety and prominence during the Crimean War, Nightingale used her newfound fame and influence not for selfish purposes or to enrich her own life.  Rather, she established St Thomas’ Hospital of professional nursing in London.  As a function of this, she ultimately laid the framework for how modern nursing education would be administered and provided within an entirely new system.  Although a great deal has changed since the establishment of St Thomas’ Hospital, the basic tenets of the nursing profession as lain out by Nightingale have remained almost entirely unchanged.  Nightingale was also someone who was far ahead of her own time about the understanding of the way that society and social consciousness, class, race, and gender ultimately affected how individuals integrated with understandings of their health and ways in which to better it (Stanley et al 2012).

At a time in which common Victorian understandings of class, gender, and race frowned upon dealing with any group differently than established norms would dictate, Nightingale went out of her way to create and distribute key health information, pamphlets, give lectures to the disenfranchised populations that she saw within her midst.  Whereas the understanding of the different ways in which the healthcare practitioner should be mindful of the unique and peculiar needs that different ages, education levels, classes, races, and ethnicities might require has been something that has only come to a degree of prominence within the medical community within the past 30-40 years, Nightingale predated this by nearly an entire century.  As such, classifying her as a powerful visionary who was socially motivated to not only administer to the physical needs of her patients but also take part in socially conscious work that needed to be done cannot be understated. 

A further contribution that Nightingale has given to the field of nursing is her background in statistics and mathematical analysis.  Her father, himself a very progressive man of the times, insisted that his daughter should be a well-rounded and fully educated young woman.  As a function of this, Florence Nightingale took a particular interest with relation to the study of mathematics and statistics.  This fascination and interest carried over into her desire to benefit humanity.  In such a way, Nightingale was among the first people to actively integrate statistics, graphs, bar charts, and a range of other mathematical implementations into the field of nursing.  Whereas these had been used in medicine since the time of the early Greeks, they had not carried over into nursing; an oversight which Nightingale saw certain to correct (Schiller 2011).  One would have a very hard time indeed imagining a world of current nursing in which careful documentation and statistical analysis of patient progress, condition, and pharmaceutical intakes were not recorded and analyzed.  As such, one can see that the contributions that Nightingale made in this respect have continued to have a profound effect on the understanding and application of nursing up to and including the current time. 

As a function of her tireless effort, social consciousness, the realization of the fact that different people have different physical needs, and appreciation for how mathematics and science can and appropriately should be utilized within the field of nursing, Nightingale has contributed an unspeakable amount to the field of nursing.  Although nearly 150 years have passed since she first began her work, the contributions which she has provided to the medical community in large part remain with it until this very day.