In 1854, the British press began reporting that soldiers wounded in the Crimean War were being poorly cared for in deplorable conditions. Nightingale recruited and equipped a group of nurses and went off to Turkey to help. Her arrival was not celebrated by the surgeons there, who resented the interference of a woman. Undaunted, she worked tirelessly to improve conditions in the hospital. Her changes revolutionized British military medical care, increasing standards for sanitation and nutrition and dramatically lowering mortality rates. While visiting the front lines, she became ill and never really recovered.
Although an invalid for the rest of her life, Nightingale continued to have an influence on standards of nursing care and training. In 1859 she helped to establish the first Visiting Nurse Association and in 1860, she established a school that became a model for modern nurses training. She was considered an expert on the scientific care of the sick and was asked by the United States for her advice on caring for the wounded soldiers of the Civil War. Through correspondence and reports, she continued her influence throughout her last years. She was the first women to receive the British Order of Merit. In 1907 the International Conference of Red Cross Societies listed her as a pioneer of the Red Cross Movement. She died in 1910 at the age of ninety.
Florence Nightingale was known by the British soldiers in the Crimea as the “lady with the lamp” because of the late hours that she worked tending to the sick and wounded. Today, she is remembered as a symbol of selfless caring and tireless service.
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/4277/nightingale.html
Client 2: Steven Hawking
Stephen Hawking was born on the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death. He has come to be thought of as the greatest mind in physics since Albert Einstein. With similar interests -- discovering the deepest workings of the universe -- he has been able to communicate arcane matters not just to other physicists but to the general public.
Hawking grew up outside London in an intellectual family. His father was a physician and specialist in tropical diseases; his mother was active in the Liberal Party. He was an awkward schoolboy, but knew from early on that he wanted to study science. He became increasingly skilled in mathematics and in 1958 he and some friends built a primitive computer that actually worked. In 1959 he won a scholarship to Oxford University, where his intellectual capabilities became more noticeable. In 1962 he got his degree with honors and went to Cambridge University to pursue a PhD in cosmology. There he became intrigued with black holes (first proposed by J. Robert Oppenheimer) and "space-time singularities," or events in which the laws of physics seem to break down. After receiving his PhD, he stayed at Cambridge, becoming known even in his 20s for his pioneering ideas and use of Einstein's formulas, as well as his questioning of older, established physicists.
In 1968 he joined the staff of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge and began to apply the laws of thermodynamics to black holes by means of very complicated mathematics. He published the very technical book, Large Scale Structure of Space-Time but soon afterwards made a startling discovery. It had always been thought that nothing could escape a black hole; Hawking suggested that under certain conditions, a black hole could emit subatomic particles. That is now know as Hawking Radiation. He continued working on the theory of the origin of the universe, and in doing so found ways to link relativity (gravity) with quantum mechanics (the inner workings of atoms). This contributed enormously to what physicists call Grand Unified Theory, a way of explaining, in one equation, all physical matter in the universe.
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