Tesis

TRADUCCION N°6
Two recent publications offer different assessment of the career of the famous British nurse. A book by Anne seeks to debunk the idealization and present a reality at odds withNightingale’s heroic reputation.
According to summers, Nightingale’s importance during the Crimean War has been exaggerated: not until near the war’s end did she become supervisor of the female nurses.Additionally, summers writes that the contribution of the nurses to the relief of the wounded was at best marginal. The prevailing problems of military medicine were caused by army organizationalpractices, and the addition of a few nurses to the medical staff could be no more than symbolic.
Nightingale´s place in the national pantheon, summers asserts, is largely due to the propagandistic effortsof contemporary newspaper reporters. By contrast the editors of a new volume of nightingale´s letters view Nightingale as a person who significantly influenced not only her own age but also subsequentgenerations. They highlight her ongoing efforts to reform sanitary conditions after the war, for example, when she learned that peacetime living conditions in British barracks were so horrible thatthe death rate of enlisted men far exceeded that of neighboring civilian populations, succeeded in persuading the government to establish a royal commission on the health of the army. She used sumsraised through public attributions to found a nurses’ training hospital in London. Even in administrative matters, the editors assert, her practicalintelligence was formidable: as recently as 1947 the British army´s medical services were still using the cost – accounting system she had devised in the 1860´s.
I believe that the evidence of her letterssupports continued respect for Nightingale’s brilliance and creativity. When counseling a village schoolmaster to encourage children to use their faculties of observation, she sounds like a modern...