A few years later, Frazier’s father developed renal disease, and Frazier ended up spending a lot of time in hospitals. When she was eight, her parents, escaping the political unrest of the region, immigrated to America, settling in Houston. “She studied Greek, Latin, and mathematics and pioneered statistical methods that we still use today.”įrazier grew up in Northern Ireland, where, she says, nurses are venerated. “Florence was a trailblazer,” Frazier says. Thomas’ Hospital in central London - the first in the world and the model for future nursing education. She returned to Britain a celebrity and prominent health advocate and in 1860 founded a nursing school at St. In her nightly rounds among the rows of hospital beds, Nightingale earned the moniker Lady with the Lamp, a vision of comfort to the dying. “She really was ahead of her time,” Frazier says. Disease, filth, and vermin were rife, and Nightingale, a demon for hand-washing and hygiene, gained insights into ventilation and sanitation. The conditions at the hospital were appalling, says Frazier. In 1854, during the Crimean War, Nightingale, who had trained as a nurse with nuns in Germany and France, led a group of nurses to the Scutari Barrack Hospital in Constantinople to care for ailing soldiers shipped there from the front lines. “She knew what she wanted in life she had a calling.” “She wasn’t interested in being a woman of wealth,” says Frazier.
Her parents opposed her desire to become a nurse, viewing it as demeaning. “Like today, illness was more common in areas without health resources, and Florence would go to where people were underserved and vulnerable,” says Frazier.īorn in 1820 to an aristocratic English family, Nightingale was a brilliant, educated, iron-willed woman who revolutionized health care and established the modern nursing profession. But the trip was postponed due to COVID-19 - a pandemic that evokes Nightingale’s legacy. And this September, Lorraine Frazier, dean of the School of Nursing, planned to celebrate the bicentennial of Nightingale’s birth by taking alumni to key sites in the life of the fabled Victorian health reformer.įrazier’s tour of London, organized by the Alumni Travel Study program, was to have included visits to the Florence Nightingale Museum, the National Army Museum, and the Nightingale memorial in St. Long Health Sciences Library houses one of the world’s richest collections of materials relating to the nursing superstar, including letters, a family Bible, photographs, diary fragments, and an inscribed first edition of Nightingale’s groundbreaking 1860 work Notes on Nursing. The light of Florence Nightingale shines brightly at Columbia.
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