page_title: Florence Nightingale
section_title: The Lady with the Lamp
hierarchical_section_title: Florence Nightingale / Crimean War / The Lady with the Lamp
caption_attribution_description: Topic-LCSH: Crimean War, 1853–1856. Military nursing. Patients. Nurses. Lamps. Care of the sick. Crimean War, 1853–1856 -- Women. Kindness. War -- Relief of sick and wounded. Genre/Technique: Chromolithographs. Portrait prints. Subject name: Nightingale, Florence, 1820–1910
context_page_description: Florence Nightingale, OM, RRC, DStJ was an English social reformer, statistician and the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organised care for wounded soldiers. She gave nursing a favourable reputation and became an icon of Victorian culture, especially in the persona of "The Lady with the Lamp" making rounds of wounded soldiers at night.
  Recent commentators have asserted Nightingale's Crimean War achievements were exaggerated by media at the time, but critics agree on the importance of her later work in professionalising nursing roles for women. In 1860, she laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London. It was the first secular nursing school in the world, and is now part of King's College London. In recognition of her pioneering work in nursing, the Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses, and the Florence Nightingale Medal, the highest international distinction a nurse can achieve, were named in her honour, and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated on her birthday.
context_section_description: During the Crimean war, Nightingale gained the nickname "The Lady with the Lamp" from a phrase in a report in The Times:
  She is a "ministering angel" without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds. 
  The phrase was further popularised by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1857 poem "Santa Filomena":
  Lo! in that house of misery
  
  A lady with a lamp I see
  
  Pass through the glimmering gloom,
  
  And flit from room to room.
caption: The Lady with the Lamp. Popular lithograph reproduction of a painting of Nightingale by Henrietta Rae, 1891.
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