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In 1854, Florence Nightingale organizes a team of 38 nurses to attend to sick and wounded soldiers near the battlefront of the Crimean war. She returned from the war in 1856 a national hero, but remained chronically ill for the remainder of her life.

A Beacon of Change (Second part in this two-part series)

In the only words she ever would commit to an audio recording, a 70-year-old Florence Nightingale spoke warmly of the British soldiers who served in the valleys of the Ukraine decades earlier.

"When I am no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life," Nightingale said in 1890, in a proper, lilting Victorian inflection. "God bless my dear old comrades of Balaclava."

Whether in her own words or those of poets, "The Lady with the Lamp" seems forever linked to her supremely humane service near the frontlines of the Crimean War in the 1850s. Her dedicated work in caring for soldiers in a hellish army barracks hospital gave rise to verse and song back in England. It also seeded the selfless, nurturing vision of modern nursing that ensconced her name for the ages.

But unlike eminent 19th century giants Dickens or Darwin, Nightingale's well-known legend does not reflect her most seminal and impressive feats, according to several Nightingale scholars. Besides creating the first training school that elevated nursing to a respectable profession, she was a pioneer in statistical research and community health. Her ideas on hospital design and function helped modernize dysfunctional facilities that were death traps for residents.

The general public, and often nurses themselves, know little beyond the cursory facts of Nightingale's history, experts say. Several of her contributions are overlooked in nursing school curricula and historical revisionists have made an industry of deriding the classic angel-of-mercy image. Some also delve into arguably trivial debates about her mental state, personality and even sexuality.

"I'm not sure her status or her reputation overwhelmed her record of achievement, but I think it did distort it," said another scholar, Linda Freeman, DNS, RN, a professor of nursing at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. "Really, the myths surrounding her aren't as interesting as the real person."

Several Nightingale scholars and medical historians have opened a new campaign of validation, hoping to shift the dialogue toward the substance of her remarkable life and reminding the nursing movement of her continuing relevance.

Misunderstood, misread

A British nurses' labor union grabbed headlines in 1999 when it voted to disavow its movement from Florence Nightingale. The union decried her Caucasian, upper-class image as unfit for modern, multicultural nursing and accused her of symbolizing hierarchical and submissive structures that kept nurses under the "boot" of physicians and hospital administrators.

The union, likening its revolt to the post-Cold War toppling of Lenin statues in Moscow, even suggested disassociating International Nurses' Day from Nightingale's May 12 birthday.

"If they knew more about the full Nightingale, they would see her as a model for today's nurse, not just a bedside nurse of the past," said Lois Monteiro, Ph.D., MSN, RN, a professor of community health and sociology at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and longtime Nightingale letters researcher.

Many researchers say Nightingale was not a meek, docile cherub, but instead a sure-minded and steel-willed administrator. She made life palpable for patients by making it unbearable for belligerent hospital committees and military bureaucrats during her most influential years from the 1850s to the 1870s.

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