What's new in Florence Nightingale, Avenging Angel?

Hugh Small's biography of Florence Nightingale (the first in 49 years) tears aside the screen of Edwardian sentimentality from one of the most famous women of all time, and reveals ... one of the most important people of all time.

He has discovered two facts that have never been so much as hinted at in any previous work, and are implicitly contradicted in most biographies:
- Nightingale refused to admit until twelve months after the end of the Crimean War that poor hospital sanitation killed her patients.  Until then, like other experts, she blamed the army for hospitalising the soldiers too late;
- Heedless of the risk to her own reputation, she tried to publish the evidence that finally convinced her, but the government refused to allow it;

Hugh Small claims that these two facts are important because they show that Nightingale benefited from an advanced medical education after the war, that she cared nothing for her personal reputation, and that she had had secrets that could destroy politicians' careers.  From them he also deduces two key conjectures (which probably can't be proved, although distinguished academics who have reviewed his book find them convincing):
- The discovery and the government cover-up caused her nervous breakdown;
- When she recovered, she devoted herself to championing the sanitary revolution in Britain and saving millions of lives, seeing it as a way of applying the lessons learned and thus atoning for her imagined failure during the war.

A further fact that Hugh Small establishes for the first time is that in her post-war arguments with John Simon, Britain's first Chief Medical Officer, she was right and he was wrong.  All other accounts claim the opposite.  Hugh Small also shows that the widespread allegations that she opposed germ theory all her life are mistaken.  He uses this analysis to show how other commentators have belittled her medical knowledge and post-war effectiveness.

Most readers find Hugh Small's story to be an inspiring one of failure and redemption.  Some, however, object to his  emphasis on the delay in improving sanitation in her wartime hospital, and think that he should have limited himself to her nursing successes.  But Nightingale herself thought that the disaster in her hospital was the most important story, and that publicising her nursing success distracted from her message to mankind.  Could she be right?  In  his book Small also shows how many millions are dying prematurely in developing countries because of neglect of her non-nursing teachings, which were inspired by the disaster at Scutari..

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