A Pioneer in Nursing Profession - Florence Nightingale

For our National History Day Project, we chose Florence Nightingale taking a stand in

the history of nursing profession. In the beginning, we got the idea from the list of possible

categories. We thought about researching the history of women rights or women who had

influential impact in history. We first had an interest on Queen Elizabeth of England for the

reason that she ruled a great empire. After some research, we found that she did not complete

that many reforms as taking a stand in history, so we decided to change the topic. We researched

about important women in history, and we found Nightingale to be interest to research as the

pioneer of nursing which also represented a professional field is opened to women.

After we decided our topic, we went to historical websites as secondary sources,

including History.com, Biography.com, Encyclopedia.com, etc, and a collection of letters related

to her as primary sources. We found most of our information about Nightingale’s life and

Crimean war which she was involved from websites and letters that were written by her. We

used some newspaper articles and poems that praise her accomplishments in establishing the

nursing profession. We also used her book and gathered information about her attitude on

nursing.

In the beginning, we only knew Nightingale as a famous nurse. After further research, we

learned that she was not simply a nurse at a hospital but a woman who established the standard

of sanitation in hospital, which benefited posterity’s health issues and wound recoveries.

Regarding to her opening of nursing field, we understood that Nightingale gained women rights

and created opportunities for women to work in society as women were considered as

housewives during that period. We found people’s admirations on her were fairly reasonable.

Our understanding of her taking a stand became more clear.

 For putting our presentation together, we first created a ratioed model of our actual

exhibit board. With the model, we decided how it’s going to look and the decorations that can

represent our topic. We annotated the sources by stating the importance to our topic, then we

eliminated them to only the ones that most support our argument. We also searched up pictures

of Nightingale as the lady with the lamp and her during work. By our understanding of the

information, we decided the placement of documents and photos by chronological and

importance orders. We mostly focused on more photos that can represent the ideas instead of

words.

Florence Nightingale founded the nursing profession. Her improvements and established,

high, strict standards for sanitary condition reduced the death rate of British soldiers by two

thirds during the Crimean War, and it still have a large influence in modern day nursing. With

her accomplishments, patients don’t need to suffer more under the wound infection. They are

now having safe, clean medical treatment.