When war-torn wards near the Bosphorus Strait reeked of sewage and despair, Florence Nightingale arrived with 38 nurses, a ledger, and one stubborn oil-lamp. In today’s Hometown History, Shane Waters traces how Nightingale’s evidence-based reforms—and the parallel heroics of Jamaican-Scottish healer Mary Seacole—drove mortality at Scutari Barracks from 42 percent to just 2 percent, igniting the global movement for professional nursing. You’ll hear midnight whispers among wounded soldiers, discover the first infographic that rocked Britain’s Parliament, and learn how these breakthroughs shaped Indiana’s earliest nurse-training schools.

• Why Nightingale’s coxcomb diagram changed military medicine forever
• The untold story of “Mother Seacole” and her British Hotel on the front lines
• How Victorian sanitation principles reached Wabash County Hospital in 1911
• The data-driven secret behind slashing infection rates—still used today

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Every hometown has a story—sometimes it walks the night shift with a lamp.

Before “nurse” meant respect, it meant desperation. In this opening chapter of our three-part series, host Shane Waters drags us into the overcrowded 19th-century wards where poverty, prejudice, and cholera reigned. Discover why hospitals were once “death houses,” how nurses faced infection rates four times higher than other women, and what drove unlikely heroines like Mary Seacole and Clara Barton to defy stigma and save lives.

• How religious charity turned into secular hospitals—yet conditions grew worse before they got better
• Why London’s population boom (1801–1841) poured fuel on deadly outbreaks
• The grim statistic that early nurses were four times more likely to die from contagious disease than their peers
• The unsung trailblazers who paved the way for Florence Nightingale—long before the famous lamp appeared

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Every hometown has a story; sometimes it starts in the shadows of a crowded ward.

In this episode of Hometown History, we explore the chilling and unsolved mystery of the Sodder children, who vanished on Christmas Eve, 1945, after a fire destroyed their home in Fayetteville, West Virginia. Despite the devastation, no remains were ever found, and a series of strange events both before and after the fire have led to decades of speculation. Were the children victims of a tragic accident, or was there something more sinister at play? Join me as we unravel the clues behind this haunting case that has puzzled investigators for over 75 years.