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At the age of 16 the voice of God told Florence Nightingale that nursing was her destiny. Known as the Lady with the Lamp on the Crimean battlefield in Turkey, she was in charge of 24 nurses stationed at Scutari Barrack Hospital. She sent some of the nurses back to England for drunkedness and having sexual affairs with the patients. She had a rule of no females in the wards after 8pm, apart from herself. She single-handedly founded the profession of modern nursing by introducing hygiene into hospital care and saved literally thousands of lives during the war itself. A little known fact about her - she had a pet owl and carried it in her pocket whenever she travelled.
During the war Florence contracted most diseases on offer, including Crimean fever, dysentery and rheumatism. In 1855, she hovered on the brink of death for weeks with fever. When the fever broke she was emaciated and had lost all her hair but still refused to leave until all British soldiers were evacuated in July the following year.
Always working to the point of exhaustion, she collapsed in 1857 and
that marked the end of her profession life at the age of 37. Her remaining
53 years were not spent in good health. In fact, she was so ill at one
point she organised her funeral. In the 1860's she was bed-ridden for
six years. By 1889 her eyesight had deteriorated so much she was unable
to read a newspaper and, for the last 14 years of her life she didn't
leave her bedroom. She lost her sight, memory and speech, dying in her
sleep just after midday on August 13, 1910.
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