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Florence Nightingale - Scutari Hospital part 1

60 second histories

This video covers:  Florence Nightingale's arrival at Scutari Hospital and what she did there.

The stench at Scutari military hospital was awful. The hospital sat on top of a cesspool that all the lavatories flowed into and this in turn overflowed into the drinking water contaminating it. Patients lay in their own excrement on stretchers, simply abandoned anywhere they could find a space. Rats and bugs scurried all over the place and as for supplies it was ridiculous! Why they didn’t even have enough soap, clean water or bandages and as more wounded and sick soldiers were brought in there was less of everything. More were dying of infectious diseases such as typhoid and cholera than were being killed on the battlefield. Well, it was a huge task so we set to work as quickly as we could. I managed to beg and borrow hundreds of scrubbing brushes and instructed the walking wounded to scrub the hospital from floor to ceiling. I spent every waking hour I could tending to the sick and wounded, bless them. All our hard work did eventually pay off as we managed to reduce the death rate at the hospital by two thirds.
Eras: 
Medicine & Health
Victorian Reformers
Victorian
Topics: 
British Empire
Key people
Victorian Reformers
Medicine & health
Character: 
Florence Nightingale
Key words: 
Short history video, history resource, school history, history video, history clip, Medicine through Time, Medicine through the ages, medicine, health, reform, victorian reform, reformist, reformer, GCSE, AQA, Edexcel, OCR, EDUQAS, Crimea, nurse, nursing, Scutari, Constantinople, military hospital, hospital, war, Crimea War, cholera, KS3, Key stage 3, Year 7, Year 8, Year 9, KS4 , key stage 4, year 10, year 11