FOR 150 years the image of the Lady with the Lamp has symbolised the selfless devotion to duty of Florence Nightingale.

Now, however, a new biography has claimed that the mother of modern nursing toured her wards at night not to cast a caring eye over sick soldiers but to check that her nurses were not drinking with them or sharing their beds.

Nightingale’s reputation was built on her work improving conditions at the military hospital in Scutari in the Crimean war of 1853-56.

She was described by The Times as “a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor.” The correspondent wrote of the “little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds”.

Times Archive, 1854: Florence Nightingale's lady nurses

How will they bear the sight of blood without fainting, and refrain from joining in the patients' shrieks when under the scalpel and the saw?

• The Sick And Wounded Fund

However, the book argues that much of her image as a saintly bedside nurse was Victorian media invention. Instead, her success at improving survival rates in hospital was a result of her skills as an executive.

“She was not really a nurse at all,” said Mark Bostridge, whose book, Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend – which draws on private family letters and papers – is published next month. “She was basically an administrator who spent much of her time buying in clothing and food.”

A note written by her sister, Parthenope, states: “What F does and what she is, is most faintly conceived of in England. The public generally imagine her by the soldier’s bedside.”

Bostridge said: “On her nighttime tours of the wards, she was more interested in checking that her nurses were not carousing with the soldiers or jumping into bed with them than in administering personal care.”

Bostridge also counters the widely accepted view that Nightingale looked down on Mary Seacole, the black nurse who treated Crimean war soldiers and whose reputation has soared in recent years.

Bostridge has found out that Nightingale helped her financially when she faced bankruptcy.

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