JOURNAL OF THE INDIAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, VOL 118, NO 08, AUGUST 2020
History : Remembering the stalwarts Rudrajit Paul, Jyotirmoy Pal about sanitation and hygiene Florence Nightingale in order to make any (1820-1910) was one of the government health program greatest health professionals successful. Such thoughts to have ever adorned the about female empowerment surface of the earth. This and public engagement were year (2020), we are th not prevalent at that time. celebrating her 200 birth She also regularly read anniversary. reports on sanitary The birthday of Florence conditions of other Indian Nightingale (12 May) is cities like Ahmedabad and celebrated as the Calcutta and advised the international Nurses’ day. government officials on ways Nurses all over the world now to improve the situation. take the “Nightingale Pledge” Nightingale was highly at the beginning of their interested in improving public career. But we think that health in India and reducing categorizing Florence the impact of epidemics. She Nightingale as only a nurse was well-versed in all the is a gross injustice to her contemporary events in memory. She was an India. For example, when Florence Nightingale excellent scholar of medical statistics and also a social (This picture is in public domain in its country of Origin) Kadambini Ganguly started practice as the first female reformer. She was also a physician of India, Nightingale wrote : prolific writer on versatile topics from religion to feminism. In fact, historians say that the full impact of “She has already passed what is called the first Nightingale on medical history has only recently been licentiate in medicine and surgery examinations uncovered fully. and is to go up for the final examination in March Florence nightingale first came to prominence next. This young lady, Mrs.Ganguly, married after during the Crimean war when she cared for the British she made up her mind to become a doctor and soldiers and helped reduce the death rate in military has had one, if not two children since. But she was hospital substantially. She was the first to scientifically absent only thirteen days for her lying-in and did demonstrate that simple hygienic measures like handnot miss, I believe, a single lecture!” washing can reduce military wartime mortality significantly. Her moniker, “Lady with the lamp” was In 1878, when a terrible famine occurred in India, coined after description of her activities in “The Times” Nightingale criticized the British government severely: newspaper and an 1857 poem by Longfellow. Florence Nightingale was a prolific writer. “We do not care for the people of India… Collections of her letters are digitized and available Between five and six million have perished in this online. These letters reveal her interests in various famine… How can we realise what the misery is of topics. They also reveal her extremely modernistic every one of those figures: a living soul, slowly outlook. For example, in a letter to Dr. Thomas Gillham starving to death?” Hewlett, the Sanitary commissioner of Bombay, she writes that the native women in India must be educated
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