WHILE Sir Winston Churchill is regularly voted the greatest ever Briton, and he is certainly the greatest Englishman of all time in my opinion, I have often wondered why no separate poll was made for men and women. After all, to achieve true greatness and be acclaimed by the public you must succeed in fields such as war leadership, politics, industry and culture, and men have traditionally dominated all these spheres. For centuries women were excluded from the paths to success.

The BBC’s 100 greatest Briton poll in 2002 put Churchill first, followed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Diana, Princess of Wales, in third. Queen Elizabeth I of ENGLAND was in seventh place. But then it was a poll of the public, mostly the English public, and we all know how accurate and sensible such surveys are, don’t we?

With all due respect to Diana, who had been dead less than five years at the time of the poll, and also Gloriana, there is one British woman whose contribution to the world marks her out as truly and undeniably great, a global figure whose work in the Victorian era has huge resonance today as we rely on nurses for salvation in this current pandemic.

On Tuesday we will celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Florence Nightingale. I consider her to be the greatest Englishwoman of all time, and the Lady of the Lamp deserves every tribute that will come her way.

She got that moniker for her work in organising the nursing of wounded and diseased soldiers in the hospital at Scutari in Turkey during the Crimean War of 1853-56.

The Times newspaper on Thursday, February 8, 1855, described her thus: “She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night, and silence and darkness have settled down upon these miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.”

For that service alone she would be worth remembering, but Nightingale did so much more as she virtually invented the profession of nursing and started a revolution on healthcare that saved, and is still saving, countless millions of lives.

Her close connections to Scotland and Scottish medical people are rarely reported and I want to put that right in advance of the bicentenary.

The bare facts of her life are well known. Born on May 12, 1820, she was named after the city of her birth, Florence in Tuscany. Her wealthy parents were then on a grand tour of Italy and they repeated that tour to Italy and other parts of Europe when Florence was 18. Having had several religious experiences, she then stunned her parents when, in her early 20s, she announced that she wanted to care for the sick.

She studied medicine in Germany and wrote her first book anonymously in 1851 entitled “The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, for the Practical Training of Deaconesses, etc”.

She became superintendent at the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London in 1853, but the next year saw her in Scutari in Turkey organising the care of soldiers of the Crimean War. She started with 38 volunteers, including 15 Roman Catholic nuns, and forged them into an efficient and caring service.

Her insistence on exemplary hygiene was such that the death rate in Scutari Hospital fell to just 2% of patients from upwards of 40%.

The press and public adored her and huge cash contributions enabled her to set up a training school for nurses in London, the world’s first such secular school. In 1859 she wrote her best-selling book Notes On Nursing and it served as the curriculum for her school. She also campaigned for better sanitation in British private homes, while she fought for, and won, a Royal Commission on sanitation in India. She also transformed the British Army’s approach to sanitation and hygiene, which alone saved tens of thousands of lives.

Over decades of campaigning to have nursing recognised as a profession, Nightingale’s own writing – books, pamphlets, instruction manuals by the dozen – proved inspirational and she was recognised as the founder of modern nursing long before her death in 1910 at the age of 90, having been made a member of the Order of Merit three years previously by King Edward VII, the first woman to join that order.

Her connections to Scotland began when she visited the country with her family as a child. After a reception by Queen Victoria at Balmoral on her return from Turkey, she was commissioned by Scottish War Secretary Lord Panmure to report on the state of army hospitals. In Scutari she was working alongside two Scots, Dr John Sutherland, head of the Sanitary Commission, and Sir John McNeill, head of the Supply Commission.

Sutherland would become her closest medical associate and greatest supporter, even if at times they were not always friendly – Nightingale could be difficult to deal with when she was determined on something. Nightingale, who never married despite several proposals, also suffered serious ill health so that much of her campaigning in later life was done from her bedroom in London.

Before then, however, Nightingale had a considerable part to play with the establishment of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh’s hospital building, insisting that if her nurses were to work there – and it did become her second nurses’ training school – the wards would have to be light and airy and have adequate bed space. Opened in 1879, the infirmary lasted in its building until 2002.

She would later call the royal the best hospital in the UK, and she also installed one of her nurses, Rebecca Strong, as the first professional nurse in Glasgow Royal Infirmary.

With their shared strong Christian faith and their ideals about public health, Sutherland continued to be a researcher and writer for Nightingale until his death in 1891. His last words to his wife were about Nightingale: “Give her my love and my blessing.” She duly wrote to The Times, insisting that they print a full obituary of her friend and collaborator.

Nightingale herself died on August 13, 1910. There are many monuments to her, but her greatest achievement is the profession of nursing, to which we all owe a massive debt.