User menu
Main menu

Florence Nightingale - the Crimea

60 second histories

This video covers:  Florence explains why she recruited a team of nurses and travelling out to the Crimea.

Just as I was getting back on my feet after the terrible cholera outbreak there was a war in the Crimea. Now I’d learned that, due to the poor performance of female nurses in the past, the war office had avoided hiring them. For example, after the battle of Alma, news had arrived home reporting on the terrible conditions in the military hospitals. It was reported that wounded and injured soldiers were being neglected, due to lack of staff and medical supplies and of how they lay in their own filth in the most appalling conditions. It was late in eighteen fifty-four that I received a letter from the Secretary of War, Sidney Herbert, asking me to organize a corps of nurses to tend sick and fallen soldiers in the Crimea. Well of course I rose to the challenge. I recruited a team of thirty-eight nurses from different religious organisations and we sailed to the Crimea in a matter of days. Although we had been warned of the terrible conditions out there, nothing could have prepared us for our arrival at the base hospital at Scutari in Constantinople.
Eras: 
Medicine & Health
Victorian Reformers
Victorian
Topics: 
British Empire
Key people
Victorian Reformers
Medicine & health
Character: 
Florence Nightingale
Key words: 
Short history video, history resource, school history, history video, history clip, Medicine through Time, Medicine through the ages, medicine, health, reform, victorian reform, reformist, reformer, GCSE, AQA, Edexcel, OCR, EDUQAS, Crimea, nurse, nursing, Scutari, Constantinople, military hospital, hospital, war, Crimea War, cholera, KS4, key stage 4, key stage 4 history, secondary, KS4 videos, KS4 clips, KS4 history, KS4 videos, KS4 history film, KS4 history clip, Victorian, Victorian Reformer, Victorian reformers, Y9, Y10, Y11, Year 9, year 10, year 11,