Florence Nightingale at Scutari

On 12 October 1854 The Times reported that sick and wounded British soldiers in the Crimean War lacked nurses and even linen for bandages. Florence Nightingale, superintendent of a hospital for gentlewomen in Harley Street, had trained briefly in Germany. Sidney Herbert, the Secretary of War, asked her to take a party of about 40 nurses to the Barrack Hospital at Scutari, now the Üsküdar district of Istanbul. No women nurses had been sent to British military hospitals before. She chose 38, among them Anglican sisters and Catholic nuns, and they arrived in November.

The hospital was filthy. There was no clean linen, rats lived under the beds, and about 2,000 soldiers shared 14 baths. Men died of typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery ten times as often as of their wounds. In one letter Nightingale wrote that 4,000 men had come in over 17 days around the turn of 1855, many with only a dirty blanket, and that deaths reached 70 to 80 a day before peaking in mid-February.

She bought 200 Turkish towels, supplied clean shirts, soap, plates, cutlery and cups, brought food from England, cleaned the kitchens and set her nurses to scrubbing the wards. Army officers she thought incompetent found her unfeminine and a nuisance. At night, after the medical officers had gone, she made her rounds, which earned her the name the Lady with the Lamp. The hospital's death rate fell by two thirds.

Nightingale later showed the army's deaths in a polar area diagram comparing 1854 to 1855, when sanitation was poor and disease killed most, with 1855 to 1856, after it had improved. She was later the first woman elected to what is now the Royal Statistical Society.