THE ULTIMATE
On this day, May 12th 1820, Florence Nightingale was born in, Italy in the city of her name.
Florence became a pioneer of nursing and healthcare statistics, and gained celebrity status in Victorian as the 'Lady with the Lamp'. Against her family's wishes she trained to be a nurse in Germany, comleting her training in 1851. On reading of the casualties in the Crimean War 1854-56, she responds to a government call for nurses, and is given the headship of British female nurses in the East. She travelled from England to Constantinople, now Istanbul, and joined the hospital at Scutari, with her team of female nurses. However, their presence is unwanted by the male nurses already there. The conditions in the hospital were so bad and rat-infested that she realises that the soldiers are dying from the conditions rather than their wounds. When the female nurses were eventually allowed to care for the soldiers, Florence directed her team to improve the hygiene of the hospital. It was at this point that the Times newspaper ran a report of her checking on the soldiers in the night with her lamp, leading to her fame throughout Victorian Britain as the 'Lady with the Lamp'. She insisted on visiting the field hospitals to see the conditions there, where at the Balaklava hospital she was struck down with 'Crimean Fever'. During her time at Scutari, she developed the use of statistics to study the impact of the hospital's care, and to work out the health issues the hospital faced. Her devlopment of such statistics, and use of statistical diagrams, gave her the evidence to campaign for resources and aid from the government, as well as earning her membership of the Royal Statistical Society, the first female member. Back in Britain she continued to campaignfor the improvement of conditions in hospitals, establishing her own training school at St. Thomas' Hospital in London. The nurses who graduated from her training, then took her ideals and evidence based approach to sanitation across the country. Queen Victoria sent her a jewelled brooch designed by her husband Prince Albert. And Florence was made the first woman member of the Order of Merit, a group of 24 individuals and the Monarch. Florence Nightingale made nursing a respectable career, that was professionalised by training and she also pioneered the use of statistics in healthcare.
0 Comments
On this day, May 5th 1818, Karl Marx was born in Germany, he became a key Political Philosopher, whist also influencing other subjects such as History, Sociology and Economics.
His key works include Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. Working with Friedrich Engels, who supported Marx and provided evidence of capitalism from his families factories in England. Marx put forward a radical version of Socialism, based upon the belief that all human history was that of a struggle between social classes, that eventually leads to a revolution before society advances to a new level of development. He claimed that capitalism was the last but one stage in Human History, where the divide between the Bourgeoisie (the few wealthy factory owners) and the Proletariat (the many poor workers) would grow so great that the workers would realise their position and hold a revolution, to overthrow capitalism, and replace it with a new system, Socialism, that would then develop into Communism, where all would be equal, without differences of social class. His ideas inspired Socialist / Communist revolutions around the world during the 20th Century, most famously Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, leading to the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). On this day, 18th April 1955, Albert Einstein the German born physicist died.
Einstein is considered the most famous scientist winning the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921, and his Theory of Relativity is a key aspect of modern Physics. His formula 'E=MC squared' is probably the most famous equation in the world. He became a Swiss citizen, and also a US citizen after the Nazi takeover of Germany, knowing that his Jewish background meant he couldn't return to Germany in that era. His fame is in part due to his academic brilliance, with him being seeing as the archetypal genius, as well as his instantly recognisable looks with his seemingly electrically charged white hair of his later years. His theories including the warping of space and time, and the impact of gravitational waves and black holes. He was influential in getting the US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to develop nuclear weapons, for fear Nazi Germany was already on that path. An act that deeply troubled him later, due to his pacifist views, but he was glad the Nazis didn't manage to gain them. He loved the freedom of the USA, but was critical of the racism in US society that he saw being passed on from one generation to the next and said he would refuse to keep quiet about it. |
Archives
January 2021
Categories
All
|