Nothing small in how Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) lived and shared her life.

Born on this day in Florence, Italy, she was raised in England and defied her wealthy parents to become a nurse. Nightingale elevated the profession to excellence and helped reform hospital sanitation procedures.

“Heaven is neither a place nor a time,” she once said.

She became a national heroine as a nurse at Scutari Hospital during the Crimean War (1854–1856). With compassion, she walked the hospital halls at night carrying a light. Soldiers called her the “Lady of the Lamp.” Her light symbolized care for the sick and wounded.

Horrified by unsanitary conditions, she took action. With data, charts, and statistics, she proved that lives could be saved with better sanitation.

“It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm,” she wrote in Notes on Nursing (1859).

In addition to her exhaustive research, she initiated improvements and purchased supplies with her own money, saving thousands of lives.

Hailed as a heroine, she was the first woman awarded the British Order of Merit.

She said, “I think that feelings waste themselves in words; they ought to be distilled into actions — into actions that bring results.”