1858

Publication of Nightingale’s Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army: “Her primary concerns, sanitation and the development of preventive methods, are the major tenets of modern public health .”  An adherent of miasma theory, she held that the few small openings in the Barrack Hospital provided “no way for the ‘hot and foul’ air to escape,” adding that during first seven months of the Crimean campaign, “mortality exceeded that of the plague of 1665 as well as that of recent cholera epidemic” (Downs, 96-97).