By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

We’d be remiss not to mention Florence Nightingale during Nurses Week, especially since her birthday marks the end of the celebration. (She was born on May 12, 1820.) I often wonder what this visionary would be like if she were a nurse today—my bet is she would be a PhD and FAAN, and conducting multinational outcomes research related to nursing-sensitive indicators with grants from the Royal College of Nursing and the AARP/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Campaign for Nursing!

Nightingale never wrote for AJN, but there are some 200 stories and mentions of her in our archives. We thought we’d mark the close of Nurses Week with a comment from AJN’s founding editor, Sophia Palmer, on the occasion of Nightingale’s death in 1910. Here’s an excerpt, or read the original piece in our archives (free until next week on AJN‘s Web site).

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