To understand more about what nursing is, start with what changed nursing most of all, Florence Nightingale. Florence Nightingale is a nurse icon every nurse should learn from and incorporate into their everyday practice. A few of the practices she was able to establish that have impacted all of nursing include: being able to bring praise to nursing, establish proper care for patients, and be a war nurse for all to remember. At the time Nightingale began pursing her career as a nurse, society had a different understanding of what nursing was. Nurses were thought of as being illiterate, rough, inconsiderate, even immoral. The role of being a nurse was thought of as a job for women who could no longer earn a living from gambling. Due to societies …show more content…
In 1854, Nightingale and thirty-eight other nurses set out to the Barrack hospital. When she arrived, the hospital was excessively packed with around 3,500 soldiers in a 1,700-size hospital. The hospital had few windows, having candles in beer bottles, most of the soldiers being bloody, without any hygiene and rodents crawling over them. (Wakely & Carson, 2011) “The military physicians and officers resented the presence of female nurses and were unhelpful and abusive.” (Judd & Sitzman, 75) Nightingale stayed positive and kept her nursing qualities still at bay, she sought to make this place a sight for recovery. She combated all the sickness and tried her hardest to receive outside help, asking for more nurses and more medical supplies. Even with all her time mostly being consumed with trying to get help she still tended to her patients. She mainly would tend to the soldiers at night, she was described by one solider in a letter saying: “When all the medical officers have retired for the night and sickness and darkness have settled down upon the miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary round… Nightingale received the nickname as “the lady with the lamp.” (Wakely & Carson, 2011) From all of Nightingale’s accomplishments during the Crimean War, she helped nurses to see and understand that