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The Power Of Florence Nightingale Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820. She is most remembered as a pioneer of nursing and a reformer of hospital sanitation methods. She was a victorian women and in the era in which she lived it was almost impossible to gain any recognition as a scholar and an expert in her field. She accomplished this feat with the use of power. The purpose of this paper is to explore the avenues of power that she used in order to cause the changes in nursing that she believed were so important. When Nightingale was a child, she fought with her mother for the right to study mathmatics. Her mother held firm to the belief that girls were only supposed to study poetry and philosophy, this would give them the background to make a good bride and be able to hold intelligent conversasions at parties. Nightingale fough against this and finally convinced her father to allow her to study mathmatics. When she turned of age, she again shocked her family by enrolling in a nursing program at Kaiserworth, Germany. Most people believed that a nurses role should only be filled by common women and prostitutes. Nighingale made it a personal priority to change this image( Baly,57). She spent three years in Germany training to become a nurse, after this she recruited a small number of untrained women and took them to a British military hospital in Scutari, where she trained them and taught them her philosophies of nursing. She believed that fresh air, water and sunshine were critical to the recovery of her patients. Efficiant drainage of wounds, cleanliness and a healthy diet were extremely important, in the days when these methods were not taught. She beleived that moving a patients bed to 3 give them a better view was a nurses responsibility, along with the responsibility to provide a healthy diet and to record what was eaten daily.
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