30 SMITHSONIAN | March 2020
COURTESYO
F^ LONDON^
SOTHEBY’SNightingale’s
pioneering graph
documented a
stunning reality:
Disease, shown
in blue wedges—
not battlefi eld
wounds or other
causes—claimed
the vast majority
of British soldiers’
lives in Crimea.The horrors she
witnessed at the
British Army hos-
pital of Scutari ,
near modern
Istanbul, would
weigh on Night-
ingale the rest
of her life. She
later described
the wards she
fi rst encountered
as “slaughter
houses.”repeatedly at military doctors and administrators,
chastising them for a host of “murderous” errors in-
cluding sending cholera cases to overcrowded wards
and delaying having the hospital “drained and ven-
tilated.” The sanitary commission’s investigation
confi rmed Nightingale’s suspicions about the links
between fi lth and disease, McDonald contends, and
she became determined never to let those conditions
occur again. “That is the foundation of all she does in
public health for the rest of her life,” McDonald says.
HE CRIMEAN WAR is largely forgotten now,
but its impact was momentous. It killed
900,000 combatants; introduced artillery
and modern war correspondents to confl ict
zones; strengthened the British Empire;
weakened Russia; and cast Crimea as a pawn among
the great powers. To reach Crimea, I had driven two
hours south from the Ukrainian city of Kherson to
one of the world’s tensest borders, where I under-
went a three-hour interrogation by the FSB, the suc-
cessor to the KGB. Besides questioning me about my
background and intentions, the agents wanted to
know how I felt about Russia’s annexation of Crimea
in 2014 and even about President Trump’s decision
to pull U.S. forces out of Syria. Just as it was a centu-
ry and a half ago, Crimea has become a geopolitical
hotbed, pitting an expansionist Russia against much
of the world.
In Balaklava, a fi shing port, the rhythmic crash of
waves against a sea wall resounded through the early
morning air as I hiked up a goat trail. The ruins of
two circular stone towers built by Genoese traders
in the 14th century loomed on the hilltop a few hun-
dred feet above me.
The rugged, boulder-strewn hills presented as
treacherous an ascent as they did 165 years ago, when
34-year-old Nightingale would climb from the harbor
to the Castle Hospital, a collection of huts and bar-
racks on a fl at patch of ground overlooking the Black
Sea. She had sailed from Scutari across the Black Sea
in May 1855 to inspect medical facilities near the
front lines. “You are stepping on the same stones that
Florence walked on,” says Aleksandr Kuts , my guide.
After an arduous half-hour, Kuts and I arrive at
the plateau where the Castle Hospital once stood.
There’s no physical trace of it now, but Nightingale’s
letters and the accounts of colleagues who served
beside her have kept the place alive in literature—
and attest to her physical bravery.
At the Castle Hospital, Nightingale drilled borehole
wells to improve the water supply and insulated huts
with felt to protect wounded soldiers against the winter