For Florence Nightingale (1820--1910), following Christ's example of service meant tending to the medical needs of the sick and injured. The famous 'Lady with the Lamp,' one of the most influential women of nineteenth-century England, is generally considered the founder of modern nursing. The best-known aspect of her life--nursing wounded soldiers at Scutari Hospital in Turkey during the Crimean War--comprised, in fact, a very small part of her fifty-year career, but provided the springboard from which it all began. Her good deeds to 'the least of these' helped elevate nursing to the respectable profession it is today.
