Florence Nightingale was one of those doughty Victorian ladies of leisure who captured the public's imagination when she went out to an Army hospital in Turkey to tend to the wounded and sick soldiers who were injured during the Crimean War.

At the time she first went to Scutari more soldiers were dying of wound infections than on the battlefield.  She harangued the War Office through her family connections (she was born into a wealthy family whose men were high ranking Government officials) and eventally she managed to improve conditions for the sick soldiers with proper sanitation, food and nursing care.  She became immortalised as "The Lady with the Lamp" because of her habit of visiting all the men in the wards carrying her little lamp.

On returning to England she made it her life's work to pioneer health care and management of the sick. She pioneered the training of ladies as nurses - a proper profession recognised by doctors as performing a vital service.  Her original nurses' training school was at St. Thomas's hospital. The Museum in her honour is sited in the grounds of St. Thomas's Hospital and it displays oirginal documents, photographs and personal memorabilia of her long life. She died aged 90 and is buried in East Wellow Hampshire.

Nearest Tube station:  Westminster