Why did Florence Nightingale become a nurse?

Florence Nightingale's passion for helping others grew out of her distaste for the gender inequality affecting women in her social circle. She was an educated woman whose early work in nursing was as an unpaid superintendent of an "establishment for gentlewomen during illness" in Victorian London (1858).

After a year of this work, she was recruited by Sidney Hebert, the secretary of war, along with 38 other nurses. Her new task was to tend to the wounded in Scutari during the Crimean War.

During this time, she pioneered reforms to both nursing and hospitals, also developing the 'polar-area diagram' for use in statistical analysis to improve medical and surgical methodologies.