Modern nursing owes much to Florence Nightingale, who ignited worldwide health care reform in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Known for her night rounds tending to the Crimean War wounded, Nightingale earned the title “Lady with a Lamp.”
When she died on August 13, 1910, she became the first commoner to have a chapel at Westminster Abbey named in her honor. Besides pioneering “hands-on” care of patients, and her outspoken concerns for radical changes in sanitation, she also established St. Thomas hospital in England and the Nightingale Training School for Nurses. Florence Nightingale believed her profession was a calling from God. She wrote to a friend: "for me . . . religion as laid down by St. John’s Gospel, however imperfectly I have lived up to it, was and is enough."
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