Chronicles the life and career of the English nurse.

Examines the life of Florence Nightingale, the nurse who worked to make hospitals cleaner and safer.

Florence Nightingale was for a time the most famous woman in Britain if not the world. We know her today primarily as a saintly character, perhaps as a heroic reformer of Britain's health care system. The reality is more involved and far more fascinating. In an utterly beguiling narrative that reads like the best Victorian fiction, acclaimed author Gillian Gill tells the story of this richly complex woman and her extraordinary family. Born to an adoring wealthy, cultivated father and a mother whose conventional facade concealed a surprisingly unfettered intelligence, Florence was connected by kinship or friendship to the cream of Victorian England's intellectual aristocracy. Though moving in a world of ease and privilege, the Nightingales came from solidly middle class stock with deep traditions of hard work, natural curiosity, and moral clarity. So it should have come as no surprise to William Edward and Fanny Nightingale when their younger daughter, Florence, showed an early passion

"When Florence Nightingale decided as a teenager that she wanted to become a nurse, her parents tried to talk her out of it, claiming that it wasn't a suitable profession for a woman. But she persisted in her career and went on to save countless lives of patients, especially of soldiers. Known as 'The Lady with the Lamp,' she is widely considered to be the founder of modern nursing." --

Sarah Anne Terrot was one of the Sellonite sisters in the small group of thirty-eight women who went with Florence Nightingale to nurse in the hospitals at Scutari in November 1854. She kept a diary and this journal gives us an understanding of that terrible winter of 1854-55, when the inadequacies and incompetence of an old order were so starkly exposed at Scutari. In 1897, she received the Royal Red Cross from Queen Victoria at Balmoral.--From book jacket.