FLORENCE watched the death-rate in her hospital in Constantinople drop from 42% to 2% in a few months, secured a pay rise for the soldiers, and organised their education.

But the strain broke her health. In 1856, she returned home, only to resume her campaign for better healthcare and rigorously trained nurses.

A public subscription, raised in gratitude for her work in the Crimea, allowed Florence to establish a nursing college at St Thomas’s Hospital in London.

She planned its curriculum down to the minutest detail, and the nurses she trained, and those trained in schools that adopted her innovative principles and exemplary discipline, were soon raising standards all over Britain and abroad.

The Order of Merit was awarded to Florence Nightingale in 1907 - the first woman to receive it - recognising her place as the founder of modern nursing.

Her social position, intelligence and upright character had not, as her mother once feared, been squandered on nursing. Nursing had revealed their purpose.