In the autumn of 1854 Florence Nightingale, soon to be enshrined as ‘the Lady with the Lamp’, arrived with a party of nurses at the squalid hospital barracks in Scutari. She was responding to the graphic accounts in The Times of the sick and wounded British soldiers lying unattended there. The shortage of doctors and nurses meant that even the most basic care and hygiene had been neglected while 8,000 men, many still in their filthy uniforms, some bloodstained from battle, suffered and died.

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