Nightingale has raised the profile of the nursing profession and left a legacy that will not be forgotten. Here are some Florence Nightingale Quotes. we have compiled famous quotes about Florence nightingale including famous nurse quotes by her, as which she lived her life.
Short Biography of Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale, nicknamed “Lady Lantern” (born 12 May 1820 in Florence [Italy] – 13 August 1910 in London, England), English nurse and statistician and social reformer, the foundational philosopher of modern nursing.
Determined to follow her true calling despite her parents’ objections, Nightingale entered Pastor Fliedner’s Lutheran Hospital in 1844 as a nurse student in Kaiserwerth, Germany. In the early 1850s, Nightingale returned to London, where she took a job as a nurse at the Middlesex Hospital for sick housekeepers. Her performance there impressed her employer so much that Nightingale was promoted to superintendent just a year after hiring.
Pioneer Nurse In late 1854, Nightingale received a letter from Sydney’s Minister of War Herbert requesting the organization of a nursing corps to care for the sick and fallen soldiers in Crimea. After gaining full control of the operation, she quickly assembled a team of nearly three dozen nurses from various religious orders and, just a few days later, sailed with them to Crimea. She quickly assembled a team of 34 nurses from various religious orders, and a few days later sailed with them to the Crimea. She agreed, and on November 4, 1854, Nightingale and 38 nurses arrived at the British camp near Constantinople.
In Crimea, on November 29, 1855, during a public meeting dedicated to the recognition of Nightingale for her work in the war, the Nightingale Nursing Training Foundation was established. Under Florence’s guidance, the nurses brought patients cleanliness, hygiene, nutritious food, and comfort.
In 1859, Florence published “Notes on Nursing,” which is still in print. Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), known as Lady Lantern, was an English nurse, social reformer, and statistician best known as the founder of modern nursing.
Her founding of the Nightingale School in London in 1860 and sending skilled nurses overseas laid the foundation for nursing education around the world (Baly, 1986; Godden, 2010). She was the “lady with the lamp” who will long be remembered for her pioneering work in statistics. Nightingale is an enduring role model for women in statistics; paved the way in many ways.
Nightingale responded to an inquiry from the British War Bureau for advice on army health care in Canada, and also served as the US government’s health advisor to the army during the American Civil War. For most of the rest of her life, Nightingale was bedridden due to an illness she contracted in Crimea, which prevented her from continuing to work as a nurse. However, this illness did not prevent her from campaigning for better health standards; she published books, reports, and brochures.
In the end, Nightingale came to the conclusion that her calling was breastfeeding; she believed that calling was her divine purpose. Although Nightingale did not step back an inch from her insistence that carefully trained nurses were the backbone of quality medical care, she knew that would never be enough. In her pursuit of integrated healthcare, Nightingale helped introduce the modern incarnation of nursing, which involved treating the entire patient.
In 1860, she financed the establishment of St. Thomas’s Hospital and, there, the Nightingale School of Nursing. In honor of the heroines, poems, songs and plays were written and dedicated. During the war, a public subscription fund was set up for Florence Nightingale to continue her nursing education in England, and in 1860 the Nightingale Nursing School was opened at St. Thomas’s Hospital. The first formal nursing education program, the Nightingale School of Nursing, opened in 1860. and is now called Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery at King’s College London.
Nightingale continued to take an active interest in the development and behavior of Nightingale’s nurses, educated at Nightingale School, until her death in 1910 at the age of 90.
Famous Florence nightingale quotes
“I attribute my success to this – I never gave or took any excuse.”
“I can stand out the war with any man.”
“Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. For the greatest things grow by God’s Law out of the smallest. But to live your life you must discipline it. You must not fritter it away in “fair purpose, erring act, inconstant will” but make your thoughts, your acts, all work to the same end and that end, not self but God. That is what we call character.”
“The most important practical lesson than can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe.”
“How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.”
“So never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.”
“I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.”
“Little as we know about the way in which we are affected by form, by color, and light, we do know this, that they have an actual physical effect.”
“A human being does not cease to exist at death. It is change, not destruction, which takes place.”
“The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.”
“Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion.”
“I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.”
“The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.”
“The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.”
“Religious men are and must be heretics now- for we must not pray, except in a “form” of words, made beforehand- or think of God but with a prearranged idea.”
“I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women… no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.”
“Let people who have to observe sickness and death look back and try to register in their observation the appearances which have preceded relapse, attack or death, and not assert that there were none, or that there were not the right ones. A want of the habit of observing conditions and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.”
“What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior… jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.”
“Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.”
“The amount of relief and comfort experienced by the sick after the skin has been carefully washed and dried, is one of the commonest observations made at a sick bed.”
“Volumes are now written and spoken upon the effect of the mind upon the body. Much of it is true. But I wish a little more was thought of the effect of the body on the mind.”
“No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this-‘devoted and obedient.’ This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.”
“people have founded vast schemes upon a very few words.”
“Let us never consider ourselves finished nurses….we must be learning all of our lives.”
“Unnecessary noise is the most cruel abuse of care which can be inflicted on either the sick or the well.”
“I can expect no sympathy or help from my family.”
“For it may safely be said, not that the habit of ready and correct observation will by itself make us useful nurses, but that without it we shall be useless with all our devotion.”
“The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are no specific diseases; there are specific disease conditions.”
“The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply.”
“There are no specific diseases only specific disease conditions”
“Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.”
“Moral activity? There is scarcely such a thing possible! Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.”
“I cannot remember the time when I have not longed for death. … for years and years I used to watch for death as no sick man ever watched for the morning.”
“Averages … seduce us away from minute observation.”
“Passion, intellect, moral activity – these three have never been satisfied in a woman. In this cold and oppressive conventional atmosphere, they cannot be satisfied. To say more on this subject would be to enter into the whole history of society, of the present state of civilisation.”
“Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.”
“Perhaps, if prematurely we dismiss ourselves from this world, all may even have to be suffered through again – the premature birth may not contribute to the production of another being, which must be begun again from the beginning.”
“Newton’s law is nothing but the statistics of gravitation, it has no power whatever. Let us get rid of the idea of power from law altogether. Call law tabulation of facts, expression of facts, or what you will; anything rather than suppose that it either explains or compels.”
Quotes by Florence Nightingale about nursing
“We set the treatment of bodies so high above the treatment of souls, that the physician occupies a higher place in society than the school-master.”
“I use the word nursing for want of a better.”
“Never to allow a patient to be waked, intentionally or accidentally, is a sine qua non of all good nursing.”
“May we hope that, when we are all dead and gone, leaders will arise who have been personally experienced in the hard, practical work, the difficulties, and the joys of organizing nursing reforms, and who will lead far beyond anything we have done!”
“The great reformers of the world turn into the great misanthropists, if circumstances or organization do not permit them to act.”
“Unless we are making progress in our nursing every year, every month, every week, take my word for it we are going back.”
“I am not yet worthy; and I will live to deserve to be called a Trained Nurse.”
“The account he gives of nurses beats everything that even I know of. This young prophet says that they are all drunkards, without exception, Sisters and all, and that there are but two whom the surgeon can trust to give the patients their medicines.”