WI no Florence Nightingale ?

[Melvin Loh]

How would hist look without another prominent individual, Florence Nightingale ? Would modern nursing and hospital care still have developed to accepted standards of patient treatment and cleanliness OTL, without her presence ? What about the Crimean War- had Nightingale not been there, would the wounded British soldiers' privations have gone on totally unabated ?

[Grey Wolf]

Originally Posted by Melvin Loh

How would hist look without another prominent individual, Florence Nightingale ? Would modern nursing and hospital care still have developed to accepted standards of patient treatment and cleanliness OTL, without her presence ? What about the Crimean War- had Nightingale not been there, would the wounded British soldiers' privations have gone on totally unabated ?

Well, she wasn't the only one though she was the most forceful and most able to get things done. It is possible that without her someone else, or perhaps more likely a combination of others, would have got something done instead.

However, it is just as possible not. That more British and French soldiers died from infections in hospital than in action is true, anyway, but had there not been a nursing reform movement during the war I think it quite possible that the newspapers of the time would have picked up on this after the war and brought about committees of enquiry and institutionalised reform from the top. It was becoming increasingly unacceptable that a soldier wounded in action should more or less inevitably die, and society could well have raised this issue to a crescendo after the war

Grey Wolf