Victorian Britain

Florence Nightingale went to the Crimea in 1854 with 38 nurses and a lamp, and turned British military medicine from a reliable death sentence into something resembling care. She returned a national hero. Then she spent the next fifty years reforming hospitals, nursing education, and public health statistics — entirely from her bedroom, refusing almost all public appearances, running the Victorian reform movement through an extraordinary volume of letters.

Mary Seacole went to the same war at her own expense, after being refused official support because of her race. She built her own hotel at the front line, cooked for the soldiers, and treated the wounded. Richard Monckton Milnes — the man Florence turned down — became one of Victorian England's great literary patrons instead. This is the era of reform, of empire, of the conviction that the world could be improved with enough effort and enough data.