Friday 21 February 2020

Special Guest Blogger: Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale here, or Nurse Nightingale as i was more formally called if you were lucky enough to be a wounded soldier in one of my field hospitals.
You had to be careful where you trod back in my day as there was always a lot of blood and guts on the floor as we had hundreds of wounded soldiers bleeding all over the place and there was also a lot of poo as most of our patients also suffered from explosive diarrhoea.
My hospitals were nothing special, just your run of the mill operations, most of our work included cutting off limbs with a blunt saw and that really hurt, i would often end up with a stiff shoulder after hacking off a poor privates limbs but chasing away all the rats attracted by the hacked off body parts piled out the back took my mind off it.
As many of the men we were treating died from diseases like dysentery, caught in the hospitals rather than from their wounds, i famously introduced cleanliness and order to hospitals during the Crimean War, becoming known as the Lady of the Lamp as i would often make my rounds at night and do that holding the lamp under my chin thing and shouting boo to try and cheer them up. It didn't very often admittedly.
I invented a chart which was dissected into sections which someone titled the 'Pie Chart' but most importantly i exposed the old wives tale that laughter is the best medicine, giving the soldiers a choice between a joke or strong painkillers, no-one ever chose the witty one liner.
My final thoughts are to be nice to nurses as we are the ones who administer the suppositories and especially you men, we choose the size of the catheters.

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