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People expect me to be sentimental. They have the image of the Lady with the Lamp β moving through the wards at night at Scutari, holding a lantern, comforting the dying. The reality was that I was also fighting the British Army Medical Department, the Purveyor's Department, and the Principal Medical Officer simultaneously, while compiling mortality statistics that proved the deaths were caused by preventable infection rather than battle wounds.
The lamp is real. The statistics killed more enemies than the lamp ever saved friends. I am most proud of the statistics. No one has ever painted those.
β Florence Nightingale, Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army (1858); Mark Bostridge, Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon (2008). Photograph, c. 1858.
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