Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) was an English nurse, statistician and reformer who founded modern nursing as a trained profession. Born to a wealthy family and educated by her father, she defied her parents to train as a nurse, and in 1854 led a party of nurses to the British military hospitals of the Crimean War, where her reorganization of Scutari made her a national figure. On her return she used statistics to force reforms in army medicine, founded the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas' Hospital in 1860, and wrote Notes on Nursing (1859), still in print. She was the first woman elected a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.