28 SMITHSONIAN | March 2020
At the war’s end,
Nightingale,
who shunned
fame, appeared
unannounced at
the family estate
—“like a bird, so
quietly no one
found her out,”
recalled her sis-
ter, Parthenope.As she departed
for Crimea,
Nightingale
learned of the
death of Athena,
her pet owl—
today preserved
in London’s Flor-
ence Nightingale
Museum.by Czar Nicholas I to expand his territory. With the
Ottoman and French armies, the British military
laid siege to Sevastopol, headquarters of the Rus-
sian fl eet. Sidney Herbert, the secretary of state for
war and a friend of the Nightingales, dispatched
Florence to the Barrack Hospital at Scutari, outside
Constantinople, where thousands of wounded and
sick British troops had ended up, after being trans-
ported across the Black Sea aboard fi lthy ships. Now
with 38 nurses under her command, she ministered
to troops packed in squalid wards, many of them
wracked by frostbite, gangrene, dysentery and chol-
era. The work would be later romanticized in The
Mission of Mercy: Florence Nightingale receiving the
wounded at Scutari, a large canvas painted by Jer-
ry Barrett in 1857 that today hangs in the National
Portrait Gallery in London. (Barrett found Nightin-
gale to be an impatient subject. Their fi rst encoun-
ter, reported one of Barrett’s traveling companions,
“was a trying one and left a painful impression. She
received us just as a merchant would have during
business hours.”)
Nightingale rankled commanding offi cers by going
around them. “Miss Nightingale shows an ambitious
struggling after power inimical to the true interests of
the medical department,” John Hall, the chief Brit-
ish Army medical offi cer in Crimea, wrote angrily to
his superior in London in late 1854 after Nightingale
went over his head to order supplies from his stores.
Yet she failed initially to stem the suff ering. DuringBYLINESJoshua Hammer is a frequent Smithsonian
contributor. His latest book is The Falcon Thief.
Tina Hillier is a portrait, documentary and fi ne
art photographer in London.