Florence Nightingale - training

It was difficult in England for women to get any medical training, so I secretly went off to Germany where I enrolled as a student nurse at the Lutheran hospital in Kaiserwerth-Am-Rhein, which had been founded by Pastor Fliedner. I trained there for three months and on returning to London I found my first job as a nurse at a Middlesex hospital caring for ailing governesses. It wasn’t really what I wanted as these ladies were comparatively well off, I really had hoped to care for poor people who were sick, but I stuck to it and it must have impressed my employer who promoted me, after just a year, to Superintendent. It was to prove a most challenging time for me though because there was a cholera outbreak at the hospital, which wasn’t helped by the unsanitary conditions there. The cholera spread like wildfire so I made it my mission to improve hygiene practices, which when implemented, significantly lowered the death rate in the hospital. Then as I was recovering from illness myself, war broke out in the Crimea.