Florence Nightingale was born in 1820. Growing up, she was a quiet and serious girl. She spent a lot of time playing with her dolls. She would pretend that the dolls were sick and she was their nurse. People would bring sick or hurt animals to her to look after. She even managed to mend a dog's broken leg when she was a young girl. She often went with her mother to visit the poor people. They took food and medicine to the sick. It was these visits that gave her the idea of becoming a nurse.      Florence really wanted to be a doctor but she couldn't because in those days only men were allowed to become doctors. She decided that she wanted to become a nurse. Her parents were very angry;the daughters of rich people did not work at all and certainly they did not become nurses. But Florence had made up her mind to specialize in nursing.      Her chance came in 1854 when Britain went to war with Russia in a place called the Crimea. Florence was asked to take a group of nurses to look after the sick and wounded soldiers. The hospitals were dirty, and there was not enough medicine. There were not enough beds, so some people were just lying on rags in the mud. There was so much sickness that the doctors could not treat all the soldiers. Florence and her team cleaned the hospital rooms and beds. They made sure that the soldiers got enough medicine. The army was unhappy because there were women so close to the fighting. They gave the nurses a lot of trouble. Florence and her team worked hard and got over all the difficulties they had to face.      Florence became famous as "The Lady of the Lamp". At night she would go from room to room checking on the patients. There was no electricity so she would carry an oil lamp with her to see where she was going. She often stayed to talk to the patients.      After the war, Florence returned to London as a national hero. A great welcome was prepared for her, but she slipped into the country unnoticed. She opened a school to teach nurses how to look after their patients properly. She never really got better from the illness that she had in the Crimea and she died in 1910.      Now Florence Nightingale is known as the mother of modem nursing. She had devoted her whole life to patients. It is because of her work that we receive the proper care in hospitals today. Nightingale had the idea of becoming a nurse when   _  .
she mended a dog's broken leg she played with her dolls she visited the poor people she was asked to treat the sick animals