She is the epitome of the caring, attentive nurse, but a new exhibition reveals Florence Nightingale was among the first victims of the media’s thirst for creating celebrities.

The legend of Florence Nightingale was born on the morning of 24 February, 1855, when the Illustrated London News published a picture of a woman gliding through a Crimean hospital ward of stricken soldiers, holding a lamp.

In a war that had sparked only negative headlines about the terrible conditions and the agony of injured troops, here was an image of angelic compassion that struck a national chord.

The picture, taken from an artist’s engraving and based on reports of Nightingale’s work, was reproduced in the Times and suddenly Florencemania gripped the country.

There was an outpouring of public adulation the like of which had never been seen before. The appetite for her image was insatiable and an industry sprung up producing statuettes, figurines from the Staffordshire potteries and posters, all by artists who had never seen her but imagined – in an idealised way – her features.

Her portrait was seen on lace mats and even on paper bags, and songs and poems recounted her efforts in tending for the sick and the dying.

She was the first mega-celebrity, says Caroline Worthington, director of the Florence Nightingale Museum, which opens this week after major redevelopment, in the centenary year of her death.

"Her sister Parthenope [got] obsessed with Florence’s story," says Ms Worthington, who notes that she "fanned the flames of the media" by passing them on to newspapers.

"Soldiers were also writing to their wives, saying they kissed her shadow and that’s how the image of the lady with the lamp was born."

When Florence arrived back in the UK in August 1856, she slipped back into the country rather as a celebrity would in modern times, deploying a pseudonym – Miss Smith – to duck under the media’s radar. It meant she travelled to her home in Derbyshire without drawing attention.

"Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were very keen and asked her to come to Balmoral. Albert gave her a jewel he had designed for her. Florence was charmed by them and sought a Royal Commission to explore what had happened in the Crimea."

Calling from God

Like a Jane Austen heroine, Nightingale had grown up frustrated by what she described as the "gilded cage" of Victorian upper-class society, desperate for education and independence rather than marriage. Her prodigious intellect, love of maths and obsession with cataloguing her shells and coins marked her out as unconventional.

When 16, she felt a calling from God to nursing, which provoked horror from her parents, because it was a profession more akin to a domestic servant. But she trained in Germany and as anger mounted over Times newspaper reports about the suffering of British soldiers in the Crimea, she was sent to Scutari to head a 38-strong team of female nurses.

In letters home, she described the appalling conditions, with soldiers writhing in agony in the wards. Four times as many were perishing from infection and disease as were dying in battle, and the death rate in Nightingale’s hospital remained high until the Sanitary Commission arrived and flushed out the sewers upon which the hospital was built.

She instilled military-style discipline in her nurses, with a uniform and a strict curfew. She took on tasks that went beyond her duty, but cemented her popularity with the soldiers by writing letters of condolence to relatives and setting up a banking system so soldiers could send money home.

"I can’t imagine going to a warzone now, in the 21st Century, let alone a woman whose dad was a millionaire, from upper class society, upping sticks and going off," says Ms Worthington. "It took immense courage."

But her fortitude in the Crimea quickly turned to vulnerability at home.

For the period after the war, and much of her subsequent life, she suffered terribly from what is thought to be chronic brucellosis – an disease more common in livestock, which causes weakness and intermittent fever in humans. She was also depressed, confined to her bed for the most part of five decades. She worked in isolation, only seeing one person at a time.

"The irony is that she’s famous for two years of work but she had a good 50 years beyond that which was more significant."

She established nursing as a profession for everyone, she adds, and her work on hospital design was followed across the world.

Using public money donated in her honour, she set up the Nightingale School for nurses, based in St Thomas’ Hospital in London. And in 1860 her Notes on Nursing became a bestseller, advising ordinary women on how to care for relatives.

Her nursing philosophy was one based on cleanliness, warmth, fresh air and a good diet. It was sensible, if a little eccentric. A woman who rustles her skirts, she once wrote, is a "horror of a patient".

She used her fame to campaign for reforms in many areas of health, often using statistics to drive her arguments. In all, she wrote 200 books, pamphlets and articles, and more than 14,000 letters. But her celebrity status always troubled her.

"She hated the legend because it obscured what she was trying to do," says biographer Mark Bostridge.

"The Lady of the Lamp is not something she attached much importance to, because although she went round the wards at night, she wasn’t primarily a nurse. She was administering the experiment of introducing female nurses to the military sphere, the sphere of war. So she would have thought the Lady of the Lamp image as misleading."

Nightingale was probably the first non-royal to be the object of such extraordinary adulation, says Mr Bostridge, author of Florence Nightingale: The Woman and the Legend. But she hated the fame and thought all the things swept up in it, like the lamp and her pet owl Athena, were trivial.

When in 1897 someone asked her for her portrait, to go into the trained nursing section of the diamond jubilee exhibition at Earl’s Court, she responded by saying: "Oh the absurdity of the people and the vulgarity!… I won’t be made a sign at an exhibition."

The concept of fame was different back then, says Ellis Cashmore, a lecturer in celebrity culture.

As the currency of the age, it’s now thought of as more desirable than wealth, he says, but in Victorian times it was associated with notorious criminals or vulgar entertainers, so it’s no surprise that an educated woman like Nightingale felt like this.

The paradox was, says Mr Bostridge, that she was able to use that mythology to make changes.

"Without that image, she would not have had this enormous power to effect the changes that she wanted to, because the government ministers were aware of the popular mandate she had.

"Although she never made any public appearances or made any public speeches, there was a fear among politicians that she would, that was her power. And as a 19th Century woman, her method of working was very much behind the scenes."

The mythology clouds the historical reality, he says, because few of us know what she actually accomplished in helping to set up a modern public health service.

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