She was a pioneer of modern nursing, a writer and a noted statistician.

Florence Nightingale was born into a rich, upper-class well-connected English family at the Villa Colombaia, Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and was named after the city of her birth. She was very strong willed and rebellious caring more for poor sick and indigent people rather than marrying well, having children and touring as a socialite    

In 1846 she visited Kaiserswerth, Germany, and learned more of its pioneering hospital established by Theodor Fliedner.

When in Rome in 1847, recovering from a mental breakdown precipitated by a continuing crisis of her relationship with Milnes, she met Sidney Herbert, a brilliant politician who had been Secretary at War (1845–1846), a position he would hold again during the Crimean War. Herbert was already married, but he and Nightingale were immediately attracted to each other and they became lifelong close friends.

He was instrumental in facilitating her pioneering work in Crimea and in the field of nursing, and she became a key advisor to him in his political career.    

Nightingale's career in nursing began in 1851, when she received four months training in Germany as a deaconess of Kaiserswerth. She undertook the training over strenuous family objections concerning the risks and social implications of such activity, and the Roman Catholic foundations of the hospital.

While at Kaiserswerth she reported having her most important and intense experience of her divine calling.    

On 21 October1854, she and a staff of 38 women volunteer nurses, trained by Nightingale and including her aunt Mai Smith{citation needed}, were sent (under the authorization of Sidney Herbert) to Turkey, some 545 km across the Black Sea from Balaklava in the Crimea, where the main British camp was based.

Nightingale arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari (modern-day Üsküdar in Istanbul. Florence and her compatriots began by thoroughly cleaning the hospital and equipment and reorganising patient care. During that time she acquired the nickname "the lady with the lamp".

During her first winter at Scutari, 4077 soldiers died there.

Ten times more soldiers died from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. Conditions at the temporary barracks hospital were so fatal to the patients because of overcrowding and the hospital's defective sewers and lack of ventilation.

A sanitary commission had to be sent out by the British government to Scutari in March 1855, almost six months after Florence Nightingale had arrived, which flushed out the sewers and improved ventilation. Death rates were sharply reduced.

Back in England after the Crimean War, Nightingale played the central role in the establishment of the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, of which Sidney Herbert became chairman.

In addition, her reputation for cleanliness reached a global audience and hospitals and nursing staff were trained according to her successes, her views and her Christian belief

In 1883, Nightingale was awarded the Royal Red Cross by Queen Victoria. In 1907, she became the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit. In 1908, she was given the Honorary Freedom of the City of London.