Florence Nightingale OM, RRC ( / fl r ns na t e l/; historically [ fl ns]; 12 May 1820 13 August 1910) was a celebrated English nurse,

, writer and statistician. An Anglican, Nightingale believed that God had called her to be a nurse. She came to prominence for her pioneering work in nursing during the Crimean War, where she tended to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night. Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment, in 1860, of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London, the first secular nursing school in the world, now part of King's College London. The Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses was named in her honour, and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday. Statistics and sanitary reform "Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East" by Florence Nightingale. Florence Nightingale had exhibited a gift for mathematics from an early age and excelled in the subject under the tutorship of her father. Later, Nightingale became a pioneer in the visual presentation of information and statistical graphics.[23] Among other things she used the pie chart, which had first been developed by William Playfair in 1801. While taken for granted now, it was at the time a relatively novel method of presenting data.[24] Indeed, Nightingale is described as "a true pioneer in the graphical representation of statistics", and is credited with developing a form of the pie chart now known as the polar area diagram,[25] or occasionally the Nightingale rose diagram, equivalent to a modern circular histogram, in order to illustrate seasonal sources of patient mortality in the military field hospital she managed. Nightingale called a compilation of such diagrams a "coxcomb", but later that term has frequently been used for the individual diagrams. She made extensive use of coxcombs to present reports on the nature and magnitude of the conditions of medical care in the Crimean War to Members of Parliament and civil servants who would have been unlikely to read or understand traditional statistical reports. In her later life Nightingale made a comprehensive statistical study of sanitation in Indian rural life and was the leading figure in the introduction of improved medical care and public health service in India. In 1858 and 1859 she successfully lobbied for the establishment of a Royal Commission into the Indian situation. Two years later she provided a report to the commission, which completed its own study in 1863. "After 10 years of sanitary reform, in 1873, Nightingale reported that mortality among the soldiers in India had declined from 69 to 18 per 1,000".[25] In 1859 Nightingale was elected the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society and she later became an honorary member of the American Statistical Association. Vincent de Paul St Vincent de Paul and Church of St Vincent de Paul redirect here. For the church dedicated to him in Paris, see Church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Paris, and for other uses, see Vincent de Paul (disambiguation). Saint Vincent de Paul (24 April 1581 27 September 1660) was a priest of the Catholic Church dedicated to serving the poor. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church and theAnglican Communion. He was canonized in 1737.[1] Biographical overview St.Vincent De Paul was born in Pouy, Landes, Gascony, France, to a family of peasant farmers. He had four brothers and two sisters.[2] De Paul studied humanities in Dax, France with the Cordeliers and he graduated in theology atToulouse. He was ordained in 1600, remaining in Toulouse until he went to Marseille for an inheritance. In 1605, on his way back from Marseille, he was taken captive by Turkish pirates, who brought him to Tunis and sold him into slavery.[3] After converting his owner to Christianity, Vincent de Paul escaped in 1607. After returning to France, De Paul went to Rome. There he continued his studies until 1609, when he was sent back to France on a mission to Henry IV of France; he served as chaplain toMarguerite de Valois. For a while he was parish priest at Clichy, but from 1612 he began to serve the Gondi, an illustrious family. He was confessor and spiritual director to Mme de Gondi, and he began giving peasant missions on the estate with her aid.
[3]

In 1622 De Paul was appointed chaplain to the galleys, and in this capacity he gave missions for the galley-slaves.

[2]

In 1625 De Paul founded the Congregation of the Mission, a society of missioning priests commonly known as the Vincentians. In 1633, with the assistance of Louise de Marillac he founded the Daughters of Charity. the Jansenist heresy. De Paul was renowned for his compassion, humility and generosity.
[1 [1]

He also fought against

GARDNER, Mary Sewall Born 5 February 1871, Newton, Massachusetts; died 20 February 1961, Providence, Rhode Island Daughter of William Sewall and Mary Thornton Gardner As a girl, Mary Sewall Gardner moved with her well-to-do family from Massachusetts to Providence, where she lived and worked all her life. Gardner credited her father and half-brother, both of them lawyers and judges, with teaching her to think clearly and to feel a sense of civic responsibility. In 1890, Gardner graduated from Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut. She entered the Newport Hospital Training School for Nurses when she was over thirty. In 1905, soon after graduating, Gardner became director of the Providence District Nursing Association, which she headed until her retirement in 1931. Worried that the boom in public-health work was leading to employment of poorly trained nurses, Lillian D. Wald, Gardner, and others prodded the two national nurses' groups to establish a standard-setting body. The result was the National Organization for Public Health Nursing (NOPHN), founded in 1912. Gardner helped draft its constitution, was active on its first board of directors, and succeeded Wald as NOPHN president from 1913 to 1916. Like the NOPHN, Gardner's first book, Public Health Nursing (1916), aimed to guide, restrain, and standardize the efforts of nurses and lay people caught up in the enthusiasm for public health. The first systematic treatment of the subject, it was revised in 1924 and 1936 and was in print until 1945. In a demonstration of the worldwide influence of American nursing methods it was translated into French, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. Although used in classrooms, the book served a wider audience by offering advice on how to found and manage a district nursing association, how to run a one-woman public-health program, and how to deal with lay boards of managers. After she retired, Gardner published two works of fiction. So Build We(1942) presents episode es in the life of Mary Melton, director of a district nursing association. Episodes inculcate proper procedures and awareness of social factors, and conversations sometimes degenerate into lifeless expositions of administrative problems, but the book transcends didacticism in its portrayal of an all-female world. Melton benevolently guides her women subordinates, giving each the guidance she needs. So Build We depicts a world where women's good intentions, intelligence, professionalism, and nurturance suffice to create harmony. The absence of conflict and of morethan-fleeting references to sufferingastonishing in a study of nursingweaken the book but suggest Gardner's vision of the ideal life. Katharine Kent (1946), a better book, follows a nurse from graduation to middle age. Like Gardner, Katharine Kent is an upper-class New Englander, a daughter and sister of lawyers who eventually heads a public-health nursing association in her own city. Like Gardner, she writes an influential book while sick and sets up a program to train public-health nurses in Italy. (Gardner used parts of letters she wrote after World War I when she served with the American Red Cross Commission for Tuberculosis in Italy in her account of Kent's European nursing ventures.) Other elements in the book apparently derive less from autobiography than from Gardner's conception of an ideal career. This book ends, as did So Build We, with its heroine affirming her delight in her chosen work. Gardner's fiction and many of her speeches, articles, and reports celebrate the value of work in women's lives. Professional work creates cherished ties f comradeship and discipleship between women, and egalitarian relationships between women and men or women and their families. Gardner tried to portray women who are happy as stay-at-home wives and mothers, but they remain shadowy figures, alive only in their volunteer service to public-health nursing. In her books it is participation in nursing's "long war against disease and suffering and death" which makes women happy. Gardner's writings, although sometimes amateurish and preachy, are valuable documents in the history of nursing, professional women, and American civic conscience. No other leader in the effort to make American nursing a profession wrote so openly about her motives and rewards. Despite its wooden dialogue, its narrow, upper-class perspective, and its easy resolution of conflicts, Katharine Kent offers a moving portrait of a woman who pursues autonomy and a fundamentally maternal and Christian ideal of service or