0:01 [SPEAKER_03]: It's 2.30 in the morning, no femur, 1854, in a makeshift army hospital, perched above the boss for a straight, rat scurry between caught stacked like bunk beds, every few minutes, another stretcher swings through the door. 0:25 [SPEAKER_03]: Another young man, chevering from cholera, or minus a limb, be marched in with yesterday. 0:33 [SPEAKER_03]: Footsteps. 0:37 [SPEAKER_03]: Then, light. 0:39 [SPEAKER_03]: A single oil lamp slices the darkness. 0:44 [SPEAKER_03]: Behind it, a tall woman in a gray dress, Florence Nightingale. 0:51 [SPEAKER_03]: But in this moment, the soldiers call her something else, the lady with the lamp. 1:04 [SPEAKER_03]: welcome back friend to hometown history. 1:08 [SPEAKER_03]: The show that takes a stroll down the main streets and back alleys of the past to discover how local stories shaped the world. 1:18 [SPEAKER_03]: I'm your host, Shane Waters, broadcasting from Wavash, Indiana. 1:23 [SPEAKER_03]: Where our own county informery once fought its own battles against infection in the days before 1:33 [SPEAKER_03]: Today, part two of our many series, nursing through the ages. 1:42 [SPEAKER_03]: Last time we traced healing traditions from ancient Rome to medieval monasteries, now we meet the woman who dragged nursing into the modern era. 1:53 [SPEAKER_03]: While a Jamaican Scottish entrepreneur named Mary C. Cole was busy doing much the same on the front lines. 2:02 [SPEAKER_03]: Stick around their stories intertwine, like two lamp wicks, burning and opposite ends of the same war. 2:12 [SPEAKER_03]: Florence was born in 1820 in the Italian city of Forensa. 2:18 [SPEAKER_03]: That's Florence in English. 2:20 [SPEAKER_03]: While her parents toured Europe. 2:24 [SPEAKER_03]: her sister's cradle name, her therapy, after Naples Ancient Creek settlement, the nightingales loved their classical references. 2:35 [SPEAKER_03]: But Victorian England did not love the idea of its wealthy daughter's working, much less 2:45 [SPEAKER_03]: Florence's decision, at 16, to become a nurse, rattled London society, like an unexpected cough and a quiet chapel. 2:56 [SPEAKER_02]: God called me in the morning and asked, what's thou do good for me? 3:02 [SPEAKER_02]: I answered yes. 3:05 [SPEAKER_03]: In 1851, she trained at Kaiserworth Institute in Germany. 3:11 [SPEAKER_03]: One of the few places that would 3:16 [SPEAKER_03]: There, she scrubbed floors alongside Lutheran decannuses, who treated typhoid without complaint. 3:25 [SPEAKER_03]: The mid-1850s, Crimean War, pitted Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire against Russia. 3:34 [SPEAKER_03]: Letters home described wounded soldiers left on the docks, limbs unamputated for days, 3:43 [SPEAKER_03]: Public outcry reached one to newspapers. 3:47 [SPEAKER_03]: The war office needed a scapegoat or a savior. 3:53 [SPEAKER_03]: Enter Florence in her hand picked core of 38 nurses. 3:59 [SPEAKER_03]: They arrived at Scooterie Barracks, at November 1854. 4:04 [SPEAKER_03]: What they found was a cesspool, literally. 4:08 [SPEAKER_03]: Overflowing toilets leaked through the ceiling into the kitchens. 4:14 [SPEAKER_03]: The mortality rate, soared to roughly 42%. 4:17 [SPEAKER_01]: We are dying by fifties. 4:21 [SPEAKER_01]: The lies eat us alive. 4:24 [SPEAKER_01]: If they do not mend this hospital, there will be no army left to fight. 4:29 [SPEAKER_03]: Nightingale imposed order, and washing stations, proper diets, a laundry, yet six months in, deaths still spiked. 4:41 [SPEAKER_03]: The unseen killer was at only visible filth, but sewage beneath the floorboards. 4:49 [SPEAKER_03]: while Florence wrangled bureaucracy across the peninsula, Mary Sequel, daughter of a Jamaican herbalist and a Scottish soldier, petitioned the war office to join the official nursing corps. 5:05 [SPEAKER_03]: They ignored her letters, 5:07 [SPEAKER_03]: Perhaps because she was a woman of color, perhaps because she lacked the right connections. 5:15 [SPEAKER_03]: So, Mary financed her own passage. 5:19 [SPEAKER_03]: She built the British hotel, part-cantine, part-clinic, a few miles from the front. 5:28 [SPEAKER_03]: Soldiers called her mother's sequel. 5:31 [SPEAKER_02]: I am not ashamed to confess I love my own race. 5:35 [SPEAKER_02]: I love to see my people succeed. 5:38 [SPEAKER_02]: but I also love the English soldier and many a brave fellow owes a life renewed to my store of herbs. 5:46 [SPEAKER_03]: Mary's remedies, Calamel for Dissentary, mustard plasters for chest infections, saved hundreds. 5:55 [SPEAKER_03]: Yet Victorian society would largely forget her until the 21st century. 6:02 [SPEAKER_03]: Today at Statue of Mary stands outside St. Thomas's hospital, facing the Parliament that once turned her away. 6:12 [SPEAKER_03]: Back at Scootery, engineers Robert Rollinson and Dr. John Sutherland arrived with the British Sanitary Commission in March 1855. 6:23 [SPEAKER_03]: They tore up sewers, installed proper drainage, and flushed the water system. 6:31 [SPEAKER_03]: Within two months, two months, the mortality rate plummeted from 42 to 6:43 [SPEAKER_03]: Nightingale's strict routines primed the environment, sanitation flipped the final switch. 6:53 [SPEAKER_03]: Vurious at how long officials had ignored her please. 6:58 [SPEAKER_03]: Florence gathered hospital data and back home, created her famous rose, 7:12 [SPEAKER_03]: but charts hit Parliament like a cannonball of colored ink. 7:18 [SPEAKER_00]: The lady has reduced mortality to mere arithmetic. 7:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Gentlemen, we can no longer plead ignorance. 7:27 [SPEAKER_03]: Florence would spend the next 50 years lobbying for public health reforms. 7:33 [SPEAKER_03]: While Mary returned to bankruptcy. 7:36 [SPEAKER_03]: In eventually, late life, recognition. 7:41 [SPEAKER_03]: Their combined influence reached Indiana in 1892. 7:46 [SPEAKER_03]: When four daughters of charity opened the state's first formal, nursing training school at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis. 7:56 [SPEAKER_03]: By 1910, the year nightingale died, nearly every major U.S. city boasted a nursing school. 8:05 [SPEAKER_03]: Even Wabash County's own general hospital, built in 1913, required its student nurses to study her notes on nursing. 8:18 [SPEAKER_03]: Standing in that ward with her lamb, Florence Nightingale became a symbol, but symbols risk blinding us to the team effort behind progress. 8:36 [SPEAKER_03]: in the courage of women like Mary Siegel, who refuse to wait for permission. 8:43 [SPEAKER_03]: Do you have a nursing hero from your hometown? 8:47 [SPEAKER_03]: Maybe someone who held the lamp or flashlight over your hospital bed at 3 a.m. Reach out to me at the email address in the show notes. 9:00 [SPEAKER_03]: If you enjoyed today's journey, follow hometown history in your favorite podcast app. 9:07 [SPEAKER_03]: Leave a review on Apple Podcasts and share the episode with just one friend who loves history. 9:17 [SPEAKER_03]: Until next time, I'm Shane Waters reminding you, every hometown has a story. 9:25 [SPEAKER_03]: Sometimes it walks the night shift with a lamp.
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