Florence Nightingale

Hi everyone!

I’m going to talk you about a very well known and admirated English woman of the nineteenth century: Florence Nightingale (1820-1910).

She was an important and celebrated nurse, writer and statiscian.

She devoted herself with so much love to his profession as a nurse (she was convinced it was “a call of God”) that until our time is considered a great symbol of nursing, because of all the medical and hygienic reforms she made.

Florence was born into a rich family, belonging to high society, in Florence, Italy.

She decided to be nurser in 1844, in spite of the family’s opposition, since they expected that she become a wife and mother (victorian values).

She began to educate herself very hard in the art and science of nursing.

The most famous of her actions was her contribution in the Crimean War (1854). She and a 38 volunteer nurses were taken to the Ottoman Empire, where the main British base of operations had been settled.

The British soldiers were dying because of poor higiene and nutrition, and Nightingale fought very hard for improve the sanitary conditions .

Consequently, she helped reducing deaths in the Army during the peacetime and promoted better sanitary designs of hospitals.

During this stage, she got the nickname “The Lady with the Lamp”, because of the article that published the Times:

She is a ministering angel without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.

In 1859, she collected funds and created the “Nightingale Fund” for training the nurses, and then she opened in 1860 the “Nightingale Training School”, in the Saint Thomas Hospital.

She died at age 90, in 1910, while she was sleeping in her room of Park Lane.

Camden Lock

Hi!!

I've never been in Britain, but I would like.

It is a country so famous that even if you have not been, you know many of the most known places, like the Big Ben, the  Stonehenge, the Windsor castle, the London eye....

I think London is the most visited city.  Anyway, If I had the opportunity to visit this country, I would go without thinking twice to Camden Lock, in London, located in the Regent Canal.

This is a bohemian district, with  lots of open-air markets and food stalls.

The markets are very large and crowded. The streets , in the photos, seem to be full of life. There are many colours and people of different styles.

There are very famous clothing stores and the pubs: there’s much nightlife and young people.

I think it really woud be an interesting and curious place worthy of visiting.

Don’t you think the same?

Best wishes!

MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT and SUFFRAGISTS

Millicent Garret Fawcett was born in Aldeburgh, Suffolk in 1847.  She was a British writer, reformer, feminist, suffragist, and political worker. In 1867 she married Henry Fawcett, an economist. He was a defender of human rights and because of his condition of blindness; he depended upon her all the time. That is why Millicent Garret started to be really involved in his work. In this year, she also became part of the management of the London National Societies for Women’s Suffrage.

Mrs Fawcett had been engaged for many years in the higher education of women and their political and economic future. At certain time of her live she became more prominent and active because of her husband’s death (1884) and also because of the division of the suffrage movement over association with particular parties, she was in favour of the non-alignment of the women's suffrage movement with political parties. Various small societies had grown up with the same aspiration, the advancing of the cause of women’s suffrage. In 1896 these were associated under the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and Mrs. Fawcett in 1907 became the president of this movement.

At first she supported the more visible militancy. Woman’s Social and Political Union pledged to work by militant, with no lawful tactics. When revolutionary militants increased their violence she was strongly opposed to the methods of suffragists and all out disassociated the N.U.W.S.S .

Millicent Garrett Fawcett emphasized her efforts on a bill to achieve the women’s right to vote to singles and widows. This attempt failed and only the Labour Party had support women’s suffrage. Like clockwork N.U.W.S.S aligned officially with Labour Party.

Then she supported the effort of the British war in the World War I. She thought that if women supported it, women’s suffrage would be conferred when the war finished.

In 1919, Parliament admitted the Representation of the People Act and British women over the age of thirty were allowed to vote. The next president was Eleanor Rathbone. She and organization, now transformed itself into the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (N.U.S.E.C), worked for reduce the voting age for women to 21, as for men. Millicent Garret Fawcett disagreed some reformations by the N.U.S.E.C and left her position on the board of the

organization.

In 1924 she was awarded with the Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire, and also became Dame Millicent Fawcett. Finally she died in 1929 in London.

If you want to know more information about Millicent Garret Fawcett and the Women's Right to Vote you can find more information in this interesting video-clip: 

Gertrude Elion

Hello everyone!

Gertrude Belle Elion was born on January 23rd, 1918 in New York. She was a pharmacologist and a biochemist. She graduated from Hunter College in 1937 and, later, from New York University in 1941. Due to the fact that she was unable to obtain a graduate research position, she decided to work as a laboratory assistant and as a high school teacher. Years later, she stopped working as an assistant to Georger H. Hitchings at Burroughs Welcome pharmaceutical company. 

Gertrude Elion and Hitchings

In her numerous researches, she and Hitchings used the differences in biochemistry between pathogens, which are agents that cause diseases, and normal human cells in order to design new chemicals that were able to inhibit or kill the reproduction of some specific pathogens without harming the host cells. Both of them achieved new effective drugs against leukemia, gout, urinary infections, malaria, herpesviral and several autoimmune diseases. 

Gertrude Elion receiving the  

Nobel Prize of Medicine

In 1988, Gertrude Elion, together with Sir James Black and Hitchings, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Moreover, she obtained other awards: the National Medal of Science in 1991 and the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. Likewise, she became the first woman to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Finally, she died on February 21st, 1999.

Rosa Parks pioneer in civil rights

She was born on February the 4 , 1913 in Alabama united states. She was raised in a poor family, her father was a carpenter and her mother a school teacher. During her life she took various jobs among them housekeeper, domestic worker and hospital aide.

In 1932 she married Raymond Park who was a barber and who belonged to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People(NAACP) . Some years later, she became secretary of the association.

All over her life, Rosa had seen the segregation between blacks and whites; the discrimination happened in every place. Even thought in public transport buses. Black people could not sit just anywhere they wanted in the bus. They had to sit in the back of the bus. If white people were already sitting in the front of the bus, the black person had to pay the fare, get off the bus, and reenter at the back door. Sometimes the bus driver just drove off and left them before they could get back on at the back door. If the bus filled up with people, the driver would ask a black person to move so he could reposition the movable sign which divided the black and white sections.

But on the 1st of December, 19995, Rosa and four other people were sitting in the first seats of the black setion of the bus, the driver moved the board back and asked the four to get out. The other three complied, while Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. The driver called the police and she was arrested. After this incident, she decided to stand up for her rigths because she was tired of being humilated.

As a result. Began a nationwide movement that launched the career of none other than Martin Luther King; which paved the way for the removal of tne racist and discriminatory attitude withing the United States of America.

On the 13th of November, 1956, the United States Supreme Court passed a court order which deemed the racial segregacion on buses to be unconstitutional. After that, Rosa Parks and her NAACP associates, suffered many attack from segregationists.

But life for Rosa and her husband became very difficult; both of them lost their jobs. They had to move to Hampton, Virginia and then to Detroid where she worked as a seamstress.

In 1965 she was appointed as a secretary and receptionist in the congressional office of African-American U.S.representative John Conyers. She worked there until she retired in 1988.

In 1977 her husband die of cancer.

In 1992 Rosa Parks published her autobiography .

Later on in 1996 she received honors such us the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinto

Rosa Parks passed away on October 24, 2005 at the age of 92.

Rosa Parks was and continued being a symbol of struggle on equal terms among human beings…

“I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free... so other people would be also free.”

RoSa PaRkS