the name florence nightingale is synonymous with devoted nursing care. during the crimean war of 1853-1856, stories abound of the nurse with the lamp who tenderly cared for british soldiers, working under appalling conditions to save many lives.
yet what is not so well known is that nightingales' barracks hospital, located in sutari (since renamed uskudar) near istanbul, actually killed more soldiers than it ever saved, and was in fact responsible for more casualties than the conflict itself.
florence nightingale was aged 34 when she arrived at the barracks hospital and immediately worked to improve the conditions for the patients spread over almost 6 kilometres of overcrowded wards. nightingale raised money for medical supplies and worked tirelessly to bring comfort to the ill and dying.
yet, the battles continued, and the dual effects of overcrowding and poor hygiene resulted in a death rate at the barracks hospital two to three times higher than that of other hospitals. of those that died under nightingales care, just 20% died as a result of their wounds, with 80% of the 16,0000 lives lost claimed by diseases contracted within the hospital itself.
far from being a safe haven, the barracks hospital, during it's highest capacity in january 1855, lost just 83 soldiers to wounds and over 3000 to other infectious diseases.
after the war ended, nightingale gave her hospital records to a government statistician, and was so devastated upon reading the above figures that she took to her bed, convinced that she had been responsible for many needless deaths, and there she remained until her death in 1910.
realising too late that she would have been better off cleaning the overflowing sewers and boiling the sheets instead of soothing fevered brows, florence spent her remaining life writing from her bed to any official she could think of to advocate the sterilization of surgical instruments, and to insist that good hygiene practice prevented the spread of disease.
and although she will long be remembered as the angel of peace with the lamp and the soothing voice, of her nursing career, the woman herself has said "it was a tissue of mistakes. blunders do more mischief than crimes".