Florence Nightingale
... wife, mother or family caregiver”. (Torres, 1980). “Nightingale conceptualised the nurses role as manipulating the environment to facilitate and encourage the reparative process by attending to ventilation, warmth, light, diet, cleanliness and noise”. (craven, 1996) Nightingale describes health as a "state of being well and using ones powers to the fullest Nightingale saw health as an absence of disease, with illness a physical state. By controlling the environment and taking care of the body, health was achieved.” (Creasia, Parker, 1996) 2 She believed that nurses should concentrate on the patient and their needs, not the disease they were afflicted with. She knew that people were multidimensional and wrote about their biological, psychological, social and spiritual requirements. Florence Nightingale basically developed a holistic approach to nursing a patient, by devising a theory that looked outside the patients illness to all their needs. Nightingale emphasized that people had reparative powers and that the nurses' duty was to assist these powers as the means of returning people to health. Florence Nightingales theory of nursing focused on environment, cleanliness and sanitation in the hospital environment by nurses. In the mid 1800’s conditions were of a poor cleanliness standard. Florence Nightingale had an immense influence on nursing. Before her intervention nursing was often regarded, at least in England, as a menial employment needing neither study nor intelligence. Although she was by no means alone in this, she helped to turn it into what she realised it must be, a respectable profession for capable women. The environment was the main emphasis on Nightingales nursing beliefs. She clearly emphasized that clean environment, fresh air, warmth, noise control and management of wastes and odours were ways that the environment could be altered in such a way as to improve conditions so that nature could act to cure the patient. She realized that internal and external environment controls were both important to the progress of the patient's health. While she stressed the importance of fresh air and ventilation and an environment free of odours and waste, she knew that properly prepared food and clean water was also necessary. 3 Personally I think it is evident today in the year 2003 that the nursing theory developed by Florence Nightingale in 1860 is still predominant. The environment with which nurses works along with training and education promotes a clean and sterile environment. Hospitals are maintained at a comfortable temperatur...