Nurses are tough subjects for biography. Their ethos of compassion and, sometimes, self-sacrifice can lead to hagiography or - when times change - invite satire. It's hard to forget Lytton Strachey's portrait of Florence Nightingale, her health broken by her exertions in the Crimea, issuing breathless directives on sanitary reform to the secretary of war, Sidney Herbert, and harrying him into an early grave. To save her poor soldiers, Nightingale had not spared herself; how, then, could she ask less of those enlisted in her cause? 'If Miss Nightingale had been less ruthless, Sidney Herbert would not have perished,' Strachey wrote, 'but then, she would not have been Miss Nightingale.'

LRB 14 April 2011 | PDF Download