Florence Nightingale and Nursing in Colonial India

Abstract

Nursing as a profession was not held in high esteem before Florence Nightingale began her legendary push to upgrade nursing following her experiences in the Crimean War. She expounded the first real systematic theory of what nursing was. Beginning with Nightingale’s influential and well publicized reforms, nursing was remade a respectable condition suitable for ‘ladies’ as played an instrumental role in institutionalizing care for the sick and professionalizing the nursing culture. Her conception of a reformed nursing practice was at one and the same time a calling and a profession. Not only was Nightingale’s construction of the nurse and the nursing profession adopted in Britain, they were also adopted by other countries in the West such as the United States and America