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Why is Florence Nightingale famous?

Historians recognize English hospital reformer Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) as the founder of modern nursing. Against the conventions of her day, she studied nursing—which was then considered a lowly vocation—in Germany. Although she then headed a hospital for women in London, England, she knew that her talents were being wasted. In 1853 the Crimean War (1853–56) broke out. The armies of Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey), and Sardinia (present-day Italy) were battling the Russians in what is now southeastern Ukraine. Nightingale was appalled by the stories of more soldiers dying in unsanitary hospitals than on the battlefield. Nightingale led a corps of thirty-eight nurses to the military hospital at Scutari, near Istanbul, Turkey, where she instituted cleaning and sanitation methods that reduced infections. Germ-killing chemicals were just being...

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