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Articles: Moral Stories | An Inspired Life
- Prof. venkata ramanamurty mallajosyula
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During the Crimean War (1853-1856) fought by the British in Turkey, the temperatures were biting cold where the soldiers were fighting. Many of them were very sick and without nursing care because few ladies wanted to go. Florence decided to go and help the ailing soldiers. After many days of traveling she reached the far-away battle-zone with 38 other nurses and found the wounded soldiers receiving inadequate care by overworked medical staff. Medicines were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were common, many of them fatal. There was no equipment to process hygienic food for the patients.
Florence and her compatriots began by thoroughly cleaning the hospital and equipment and reorganizing patient care. However, during her time there the death rate did not drop; on the contrary, it began to rise. The death count would be highest of all other hospitals in the region. During her first winter, 4077 soldiers died. Ten times more soldiers died from infectious diseases such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. Conditions at the temporary barracks hospital were so fatal for the patients because of overcrowding and the hospital's defective sewers and lack of ventilation.
Helping the soldiers during the Crimen War.
A sanitary commission had to be sent out by the British government in March 1855, almost six months after Florence Nightingale had arrived, which ordered the flushing out of the sewers and improved ventilation. As a result death rates were sharply reduced.
Nightingale continued believing the death rates were due to poor nutrition and supplies and overworking of the soldiers. It was not until after she returned to Britain and began collecting evidence before the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, that she realised that most of the soldiers at the hospital were killed by poor sanitary conditions. This experience would influence her later career, when she advocated the importance of sanitary living conditions. Consequently, she reduced deaths in the Army during peacetime and turned attention to the sanitary design of hospitals.
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