title: Florence Nightingale and the British Sanitary Commission
abstract: The historiography of the Crimean campaign has tended to concentrate on the disasters of the first winter and the perceived incompetence of the heads of department, while the contributions made by Florence Nightingale and the Sanitary Commissioners have been over-emphasized. Inevitably this has established an unbalanced view of what actually took place. That view has been distorted further by commentators who too have failed to consider events in the strict order of their occurrence, and who hav