English nurse, educator and social reformer Florence Nightingale was BOTD in 1820. Born in Florence, Italy to an upper-middle class English family, she was raised in England and given an unusually extensive education for a woman of her time. She followed her progressive parents into social reform, though shocked them by becoming a nurse. She rose to prominence during the Crimean War, where she improved sanitary conditions in military hospitals, vastly reducing infection and death rates. She returned to England a celebrity, dubbed “The Lady with the Lamp”, and raised funds to establish a secular training school for nurses, the first of its kind in the Western world. She wrote over 200 publications establishing the modern practice of nursing, including the well-received Notes on Nursing, and became a pioneer in the use of statistics to understand epidemiology and patient mortality. A committed Christian, Nightingale never married or had children, and her closest relationships were with other women. Biographers have speculated she may have been a lesbian, mostly on the basis of a letter in which she admitted to sharing a bed with other women, concluding “No woman has excited passions among women more than I have.” She spent the last years of her life as an invalid, dying in 1910 at the age of 90. Her saintly reputation was pilloried by Lytton Strachey in his 1918 book Eminent Victorians, portraying her as an ambitious and humourless martinet. In 1975 she became the first woman to be featured on English banknotes. London’s first purpose-built COVID hospital, constructed in 2020, was named The Nightingale in her honour. International Nurses’ Day is celebrated today on her birthday.