Florence Nightingale is famous as the âlady with the lampâ in the Crimean War, 1854â56. There is a massive amount of literature on this work, but, as editor Lynn McDonald shows, it is often erroneous, and films and press reporting on it have been even less accurate. The Crimean War reports on Nightingaleâs correspondence from the war hospitals and on the staggering amount of work she did post-war to ensure that the appalling death rate from disease (higher than that from bullets) did not recur.
This volume contains much on Nightingaleâs efforts to achieve real reforms. Her well-known, and relatively âsanitizedâ, evidence to the royal commission on the war is compared with her confidential, much franker, and very thorough Notes on the Health of the British Army, where the full horrors of disease and neglect are laid out, with the names of those responsible.