The best-known engagement of the Crimean War (1853 to 1856) is the Charge of the Light Brigade. This event took place on October 25, 1854, at the Battle of Balaklava, at which the British, with their principal allies France and Turkey, fought against the imperial ambitions of Czar Nicholas I of Russia. Poor leadership, together with faulty intelligence and garbled orders, sent some 670 British cavalrymen armed with sabers into the “Valley of Death” to capture Russian guns on the surrounding hills. Hundreds of men and horses were wounded and killed by Russian fire during the 7.5 minutes it took for the force to reach the bottom of the valley. Alfred Lord Tennyson celebrated the valorous British cavalry in his poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade”: “Theirs not to reason why,/Theirs but to do and die.”

Five days after the arrival in Scutari (now Üsküdar), Turkey, of the wounded men of the Light Brigade, the most famous Victorian woman (other than the queen), Florence Nightingale (1820 to 1910), began her work as head of a contingent of British nurses posted to the war zone. The Turks had offered the British the use of their army barracks at Scutari, at the mouth of the Bosporus, across from Constantinople. These rat-infested, filthy, and dilapidated structures, with their overflowing sewers, became Florence Nightingale’s hospital. Plagued by mosquitoes, the wounded men, many with maggot-infested sores, lay crowded together. Because of the total lack of sanitation, cholera, dysentery, typhus, and typhoid killed large numbers of the soldiers who did not die in battle.

The army surgeons at Scutari held the traditional prejudice against female nurses, believing that they were mostly drunken and lascivious, and initially prevented them from treating the injured of the Light Brigade. However, the surgeons gave in later, when hundreds of wounded arrived. To prevent nurses’ misbehavior, Nightingale forbade women admission to the wards at night, patrolling with her lamp to ensure that the men were alone. True, some of the nurses (and their patients) drank, and others proved promiscuous. Nightingale sent several disobedient nurses back to England.

The terrible conditions favored infectious diseases: “There were no beds: the men lay on the floorboards, still in their blood-encrusted uniforms and covered by filthy blankets. … There was no soap, no hospital clothing and no laundry.” Despite her nurses’ improvements in hospital hygiene, Nightingale’s own statistics proved that mortality rates at Scutari were sky high. She failed to understand the connection between open sewers, dirty blankets, and infection, or the germ theory of disease. Alarmed at mortality rates >40%, the War Office sent out a commission to investigate the hospital. As a result, the sewers were flushed out, and mortality rates decreased. Nightingale was a superior administrator and statistician, but not a clinician. Today, she is known as the founder of the nursing profession.

Recent research has raised doubt about Nightingale’s reputation as the only heroic nurse of the Crimean War. Mary Jane Seacole (1805 to 1881), born in Jamaica, was the daughter of a Scottish father and a free Creole mother. She was an herbalist, a healer, a nurse, an explorer, and a businesswoman; she had had nursing experience with yellow fever in Kingston and cholera in Panama. A widow, Seacole carried letters of recommendation from home to London and was 1 of 3 black nurses who applied to Nightingale to be allowed to serve in the Crimean War. Nightingale’s committee rejected her; as Seacole stated in her autobiography, “Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs? Tears streamed down my foolish cheeks, as I stood in the fast thinning streets; tears of grief.” Seacole was determined to serve and found a business partner; together, they raised the necessary funds to purchase medicines, foods, and other goods, which she transported to the Crimea. Seacole set up a store, restaurant, and hotel for British officers near Kadikoi. Among a variety of merchandise, she sold champagne and home-cooked meals.

The soldiers, including the Russians, knew her as Mother Seacole; she nursed their wounds at her hotel and carried free sandwiches, mugs of tea, and medicines to the needy in the field. Seacole’s herbal medicines held the cure for dysentery, diarrhea, and other camp illnesses. Her personal warmth comforted the men, even on their deathbeds. After the fall of Sevastopol, she rode into the city, which had been deserted by the living but still housed Russian soldiers. A British journalist described the carnage: “I beheld … the rotten and festering corpses of the soldiers, who were left to die in their extreme agony, untended, uncared for, packed as close as they could be stowed, some on the floors, others on wretched trestles and bedsteads, or pallets of straw, sopped and saturated with blood, which oozed and trickled through upon the floor. … Many, with legs and arms broken and twisted, the jagged splinters sticking through the raw flesh, implored aid, water, food, or pity.” One of the British officers remembered the black nurse: “She was a wonderful woman. All the men swore by her, and in case of any malady would seek her advice and use her herbal medicines, in preference to reporting themselves to their own doctors.”

When the war ended, Seacole returned to England, bankrupt. Her book, Mrs. Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures in Many Lands (1857), became a bestseller and the first autobiography by a black woman in Britain. She was able to recoup her financial losses in the Crimean War. Seacole eventually died of a stroke in London, leaving a sizable estate.