CLT Practice Test 6

Historical Profile

¹This passage is an original essay written for PrepBanq practice.

²Florence Nightingale was born in 1820 in the Italian city whose name she was given. Her parents, wealthy members of the English [1] gentry expected her to marry well and to manage a household of her own. Florence, however, believed from the age of sixteen that she had been called to some form of service. For years she [2] studies hospital reports and government statistics in whatever hours her social duties left free, and in 1853 she finally became superintendent of a small hospital for women in London.

³The next year, Britain went to war with Russia in the Crimea, and newspaper reports described wounded soldiers dying in filthy, neglected hospitals. Sidney Herbert, the secretary at war, asked Nightingale to lead a party of nurses to the British army's hospital at Scutari, across the Bosporus from Constantinople. She arrived in November 1854 with thirty-eight women. The army doctors were at first [3] adverse to accepting help from female nurses, but as the wards overflowed, they began to rely on her.

⁴Among the problems she confronted [4] was overcrowded wards, broken drains, and a shortage of everything from soap to bandages. She organized a laundry, bought supplies with money raised by readers of The Times, and walked the wards at night carrying a lamp. The death rate at Scutari fell sharply after a government sanitary commission arrived in the spring of 1855 to flush the sewers and improve ventilation.

⁵After the war, Nightingale became convinced that most of the soldiers who died had been killed not by their wounds but by preventable disease. [5] To make this case to officials who might never read pages of tables, she turned the numbers into pictures. [6] Her diagrams were wedge-shaped, and each wedge of the diagrams stood for a single month, and the size of each wedge showed how many soldiers had died in that particular month of the war. Many officials had skimmed past her written tables. [7] Similarly, they could hardly ignore a picture in which the blue wedges of preventable death dwarfed all the others.

⁶In 1858 she became the first woman elected to the Statistical Society of London. Two years later she used money donated in her honor to found a training school for nurses at St. Thomas' [8] Hospital; its graduates carried her methods to hospitals across Britain and beyond. She also wrote Notes on Nursing (1859), a short book addressed to the many women [9] who cared for sick relatives at home. Although she spent much of her later life as an invalid, rarely leaving her rooms, she continued to advise officials on hospital design and army health through a steady stream of letters and reports. In 1907 she became the first woman to receive the Order of Merit. [10] By the time she died in 1910, she had pretty much totally changed how everybody thinks about nursing and hospitals, which is super impressive.