Rudrajit Paul, Jyotirmoy Pal

JOURNAL OF THE INDIAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, VOL 118, NO 08, AUGUST 2020

History : Remembering the stalwarts

Rudrajit Paul, Jyotirmoy Pal

Florence Nightingale about sanitation and hygiene (1820-1910) was one of the in order to make any greatest health professionals government health program to have ever adorned the successful. Such thoughts surface of the earth. This about female empowerment year (2020), we are and public engagement were celebrating her 200 th birth not prevalent at that time. anniversary. She also regularly read

The birthday of Florence reports on sanitary Nightingale (12 May) is conditions of other Indian celebrated as the cities like Ahmedabad and international Nurses’ day. Calcutta and advised the Nurses all over the world now government officials on ways take the “Nightingale Pledge” to improve the situation. at the beginning of their Nightingale was highly career. But we think that interested in improving public categorizing Florence health in India and reducing Nightingale as only a nurse the impact of epidemics. She is a gross injustice to her was well-versed in all the memory. She was an contemporary events in excellent scholar of medical Florence Nightingale India. For example, when statistics and also a social (This picture is in public domain in its country of Origin) Kadambini Ganguly started reformer. She was also a practice as the first female prolific writer on versatile topics from religion to physician of India, Nightingale wrote : feminism. In fact, historians say that the full impact of Nightingale on medical history has only recently been “She has already passed what is called the first uncovered fully. licentiate in medicine and surgery examinations

Florence nightingale first came to prominence and is to go up for the final examination in March during the Crimean war when she cared for the British next. This young lady, Mrs.Ganguly, married after soldiers and helped reduce the death rate in military she made up her mind to become a doctor and hospital substantially. She was the first to scientifically has had one, if not two children since. But she was demonstrate that simple hygienic measures like handabsent only thirteen days for her lying-in and did washing can reduce military wartime mortality not miss, I believe, a single lecture!” significantly. Her moniker, “Lady with the lamp” was coined after description of her activities in “The Times” In 1878, when a terrible famine occurred in India, newspaper and an 1857 poem by Longfellow. Nightingale criticized the British government severely:

Florence Nightingale was a prolific writer. Collections of her letters are digitized and available “We do not care for the people of India… online. These letters reveal her interests in various Between five and six million have perished in this topics. They also reveal her extremely modernistic famine… How can we realise what the misery is of outlook. For example, in a letter to Dr. Thomas Gillham every one of those figures: a living soul, slowly Hewlett, the Sanitary commissioner of Bombay, she starving to death?” writes that the native women in India must be educated

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