Who was Florence Nightingale?
The daughter of a wealthy English family, she was named after the Italian city where she was born on 12 May 1820. Her father taught Florence himself, and she received a remarkable education for a woman of her time in Greek, Latin, German, French, history, philosophy, music and art. She was deeply religious and around the age of 18 came to believe that serving humanity was the best way to serve God, and decided to devote her life to improving the human condition. Around the same time she began to study mathematics, for which she discovered a passion, but only persuaded her parents to allow her to take mathematics lessons after overcoming their vigorous opposition. In 1845 she revealed her desire to become a nurse to her horrified family. There followed six years of desperate unhappiness, which culminated in 1851 with Florence rebelling against her family and spending several months training as a nurse at Kaiserwerth in Germany. In April 1853 she was given an administrative post at the I
