Celebrating Florence Nightingale and her contribution to nursing

The World Health Organization designated 2020 as the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife, in honour of the 200th anniversary of Florence Nightingale's birth.

Nightingale, undoubtedly the instigator of modern nursing, was born in Italy on May 12, 1820, one year after Queen Victoria, and she died on 13 August 1910 at the age of 90, outliving the monarch by 9 years.

Nursing is as old as humanity itself, with the word nurse originating from the Latin nutricia, meaning ‘to nourish’. Although all societies throughout history attended to the sick and injured, it was the Middle Ages that saw the arrival of nursing linked to religious orders, something that prevails to this day.

Baly (1995) gives a good description of nursing within the religious orders prior to the modern era. Not all nursing orders relied on nuns. For example, the Knights Hospitaller of the crusades (derived from the Latin hospitále, a word used to describe a residence for pilgrims and travellers), were members of a religious order devoted to the care of the sick or needy. The origins of the hospitallers came from an 11th century hospital founded in Jerusalem by Italian merchants from Amalfi specifically to care for sick and poor pilgrims. Later, the hospitallers founded similar institutions in French and Italian cities that were on the route to the Holy Land and where the celibate knights combined the tending and caring for the sick with defending the Crusader kingdom.