One Tough Lady   
        
   She was brave, selfless and ambitious. She shunned fame. 

   On May 12, Britain will celebrate her 200th birthday. Florence Nightingale served as a nurse for only three years ... a lifetime for most of us.   
 

   In 1854-1856 British, Ottoman and French soldiers fought to expel Russians from the Crimean Peninsula - yes, the same Crimea that Russia recently stole from Ukraine. 

   Florence's father inherited a fortune. She could have married and lived the good life, like her sister. At age 16 she had a spiritual awakening, believing God wanted her to do his work. Nursing was a disreputable occupation. 

     She trained in continental Europe and cared for prostitutes during a cholera epidemic in 1853. When war broke out, a British official - friend of her father - sent her to a hospital near Constantinople with 38 nurses.
  
      "God's work" involved ministering to wounded troops transferred on filthy ships, packed in squalid wards, racked by frostbite, gangrene, dysentery and cholera. If that wasn't bad enough, military higher-ups considered her a nuisance. She went around them to acquire supplies.

   Ten times more soldiers died from typhus, cholera, typhoid fever and dysentery than from battle wounds. The war claimed 900,000 lives, far more  than the U.S. Civil War which followed a few years later.

   Florence also climbed a rugged hill in Crimea to work for seven months at makeshift medical stations, day and night, and even visited a trench on the battlefield. Food was scarce.  

   An effort to counter unsanitary conditions reduced the mortality rate by 40 percent. Historians and public health experts debate what role Nightingale had in that turnaround. But disease prevention was her focus the rest of her life, out of public view, applying statistics to the cause. She died in 1910 at age 90.
  

Smithsonian magazine
March 2020

      Jimmy