As Janet B Quilloy knows very well, nursing is a very hard, yet very rewarding, profession. Nurses literally have the power of life and death over their patients. A single mistake can mean the difference between life and death, between consciousness and coma, between an able-bodied patient and a patient who is paralyzed.
Janet Quilloy has been a nurse for 24 years, and she has seen a great many things and met a great many people through her work. She knows how hard the work is, and how rewarding, too. She has seen many a mother greet her newborn baby with tears of joy. She has seen many patients pass away – from old age, from disease, and from horrifying accidents.
The first nurse to be known as such was the famous Florence Nightingale, who defied her family and the society in which she was raised to nurse English soldiers during the Crimean War. Nightingale was already working in the field of health care, which was quite a surprise for a woman in the year 1853. The Crimean War broke out the following year, and Nightingale traveled to the area along with many nurses she had trained herself, including her own aunt. 15 nuns also traveled with them to bring comfort to the wounded and sick.
Nightingale found horrifyingly unsanitary conditions in Turkey, where the soldiers were hospitalized. Pleas to the British government resulted in a prefabricated hospital being manufactured in Britain and sent to Turkey, where it was quickly constructed. This, along with Nightingale’s then revolutionary insistence that all nurses wash their hands before and between tending to patients, was responsible for a sharp decline in the death rate.
Disease killed far more men than any other cause. These diseases, generally due to lack of proper ventilation and sewage, included typhus, cholera, typhoid, and dysentery. Nightingale’s work included ensuring that the sewers were cleaned and the ventilation improved, leading again to a much higher number of soldiers surviving.
Nightingale had made a name for herself that lasts to this day, and her popularity was such that she was given a large sum of money to create a training school for nurses. This school is still in existence, and it is now part of King’s College London. Janet Quilloy is very proud and pleased to be a nurse, one of those tireless workers typified by Florence Nightingale and others like her.
Janet Quilloy has been a nurse for 24 years, and she has seen a great many things and met a great many people through her work. She knows how hard the work is, and how rewarding, too. She has seen many a mother greet her newborn baby with tears of joy. She has seen many patients pass away – from old age, from disease, and from horrifying accidents.
The first nurse to be known as such was the famous Florence Nightingale, who defied her family and the society in which she was raised to nurse English soldiers during the Crimean War. Nightingale was already working in the field of health care, which was quite a surprise for a woman in the year 1853. The Crimean War broke out the following year, and Nightingale traveled to the area along with many nurses she had trained herself, including her own aunt. 15 nuns also traveled with them to bring comfort to the wounded and sick.
Nightingale found horrifyingly unsanitary conditions in Turkey, where the soldiers were hospitalized. Pleas to the British government resulted in a prefabricated hospital being manufactured in Britain and sent to Turkey, where it was quickly constructed. This, along with Nightingale’s then revolutionary insistence that all nurses wash their hands before and between tending to patients, was responsible for a sharp decline in the death rate.
Disease killed far more men than any other cause. These diseases, generally due to lack of proper ventilation and sewage, included typhus, cholera, typhoid, and dysentery. Nightingale’s work included ensuring that the sewers were cleaned and the ventilation improved, leading again to a much higher number of soldiers surviving.
Nightingale had made a name for herself that lasts to this day, and her popularity was such that she was given a large sum of money to create a training school for nurses. This school is still in existence, and it is now part of King’s College London. Janet Quilloy is very proud and pleased to be a nurse, one of those tireless workers typified by Florence Nightingale and others like her.
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