The story goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century. England was at var with Russia, and an English army was fighting in the Crimea. Disturbing reports, chiefly from the pen of William Russel, The Times reporter, began to come to England of the terrible conditions in the hospitals where our wounded men were being treated. the chief hospital, the one at Scutari in Turkey, was an old barracks. It was built over a vast drain up which the wind blew evil-smelling air. The floors were broken and the building was swarming with rats and mice. But even this horrible place was overcrowded. There were hardly any beds, and men were lying on the floor, in the passages, anywhere. There were no clean shirts for the men, and they lay in their blood-soaked rags. They were dying in thousands, not of their wounds so much as of sickness. The only nurses were old soldiers long past fighting age, who knew nothing of nursing and were quite unable to do the work. That was the terrible position when Sydney Herbert, the Minister for War, wrote to Florence Nightingale asking if she would go out to the Crimea with a band of nurses. his letter crossed hers in the post offering her services. Within a week she was ready, and with thirty-eight nurses she sailed for Scutari.The Nightingales moved in the highest social class. Cabinet Ministers were frequent visitors to their house. They were very wealthy; they had two large country houses and town house in London. They travelled a good deal, and Florence (she was so called because she was born in the city of Florence in 1820) was highly educated in music, art, literature, Latin and Greek. She spoke Italian, French, German with easy, was attractive, and was expected to marry one of the numerous admirers who came to the Nightingales' home. But ever since she was a child she had nursed the villagers and the sick dogs and cats and horses round her home and had had a passion to be anurse. Her parents were horrified and did all they could to prevent it, but Florence was not to be turned aside. Whenever she was abroad she visited hospitals, she read, secretly, books on nursing, reports of medical societies, histories of hospitals. She spent some weeks as a sister in a hospital in Paris and three month in a nursing school at Kaiserwerth in Germany, and kept up a constant struggle with her parents.

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