Introduction Florence Nightingale was a Victorian-era English woman who greatly improved the care of sick and dying soldiers during the Crimean war. She was the lady carrying a lamp as she made her way through the dark and damp halls of a make-shift hospital where hundreds of men lay inches apart in unspeakable conditions. She was the heroine of the Crimean war, returning to England and avoiding every attempt at fame as she quietly withdrew and secluded herself from mainstream society. Her efforts to remain anonymous were so well orchestrated that, when she died at the age of 90, many were surprised to know that she was still alive, thinking she had died decades earlier. Florence Nightingale was memorialized and archived onto the pages of many children’s books. Her absence from society blocked from public view the many accomplishments she achieved during her lifetime, and left in its place the child’s story book nurse, whose life reads like a chapter from a book of saints. There is an irony about the story of the reclusive Lady with the Lamp, one that surfaced after her death. Among her possessions were found thousands of letters she had written and some that had been written to her, as well as many notes and diary entries, all of which helped to remove much of the shadow that had been cast over the life of England’s famous daughter. The breadth and detail of the documentation told the story of a woman whose