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Of roughly 22,000 English deaths from 1854-56, more than 17,000 were from non-combat-related causes like disease, starvation and exposure. Army and government officials accustomed to treating soldiers as "scum" and "black sheep" were nonplussed at the public's shock from reading the dispatches from the first-ever war correspondents that accompanied the troops to battle, according to Cecil Woodham-Smith's 1950 biography of Nightingale.

The British public's support for the war quickly waned. "Crimea was for Britain what Vietnam was for us," Beck said.

Nightingale, moved by the plight of the soldiers and accepting an invitation from war secretary Sidney Herbert, formed a team of 38 nurses to head to Turkey and aid the soldiers suffering in the Scutari facility outside of Constantinople (now Istanbul).

"She was told everything was fine, but of course it was appalling," McDonald said.

Nightingale arrived with her team in November 1854, to a less-than-warm greeting from the overworked physicians and unimpressed pencil pushers responsible for the army's chaotic provisional methods. No extra clothing or eating utensils were initially provided for the wounded, for example, because the army expected wounded soldiers to carry these items with them from the battlefield.

"She had a number of people and military officers, who carried on an adversarial relationship because she brought attention to the conditions they were responsible for," Beck said. Nightingale's service "was only 21 months total, [in which] she essentially worked around the clock."

Monteiro said Nightingale tended to the soldiers' social needs as well, such as fighting for new regulations that allowed soldiers to send their pay directly home to families. She wrote thousands of letters for injured or dying soldiers, and offered them books, games and "amusements" that occupied their time-and distracted them from the temptations of drinking and prostitution that traditionally were in the periphery of such military encampments, researchers say.

Fame in England

"Angels With Sweet Approving Smiles." "The Star in the East." "The Shadow on the Pillow." "The Soldier's Cheer."

Nightingale was the subject of a virtual hit parade of popular songs while she was still in Turkey. A penny-priced, quick-turn biography of her hit the streets, and the attention only multiplied when Nightingale herself was stricken with disease while attending the front-and refused to leave.

Hearing of the acclaim did not impress her, scholars say. "She didn't want to get her fame on the backs of the soldiers who had died," Monteiro said. "She rejected celebrity."

But Nightingale did not reject the attention out-of-hand. As in her Harley Street days, she was eager to bring changes for hospitals and nursing, and knew she now had the ear of some powerful people, like Sidney Herbert.

Nightingale wrote more than 30 unofficial letters to Herbert while in Turkey, suggesting changes to hospital and army procurement methods. Woodham-Smith and other historians say Nightingale was a key instigator in establishing a sanitary commission in January 1855 to investigate the climbing mortality rates at the Army barracks hospital. She worked behind the scenes because women could not sit on the commission or even bring formal testimony.

The commission's findings, which presented astonishing descriptions of cesspool sewer systems and dead animals in the hospital's water supply, led to immediate improvements in sanitation at the Scutari facility, by lime-washing walls, clearing out underground sewage systems and ridding the place of vermin.

Ironically, the lifesaving work of the 1855 sanitation commission is commonly cited in criticism of Nightingale. Some historians during the past few decades have derided her work in the Crimean War, most specifically in charges that "The Lady with the Lamp" had nothing to do with actually saving lives at the hospital.

Blaming Nightingale

A BBC-authored biography of Nightingale states that "historians are waking up to the shocking truth" that death rates at her hospital were higher than at other Army hospitals, and her "lack of knowledge of the disastrous sanitary conditions at Scutari was responsible." The BBC concludes that Nightingale managed only to "help [soldiers] die in cleaner surrounding and greater comfort, but she had not saved their lives."