Florence Nightingale's Lamp in the Darkness

When Florence Nightingale arrived at the British military hospital in Scutari, Turkey, in 1854, she found soldiers dying not from their wounds but from the building itself. Sewage ran beneath the floors. Rats scurried across patients. The mortality rate was a staggering 42 percent. The military establishment told her the conditions were acceptable — the men were just soldiers, after all.…