Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), known as "the lady with the lamp" and the founder of modern nursing, was born into a wealthy British family. Eschewing popular stigma that nursing was a lowly profession, she travelled to Turkey in 1854 during the Crimean War to care for wounded soliders. While there, she completely revolutionzed the field of nursing, eliminating widespread disease and improper sanitation. The hospital she attended to saw its death rate fall from 40 percent to two percent under her care. After the war, she returned to England and founded her own school for nursing. Beyond transforming nursing into a respected profession, her pioneering use of statistics and emphasis on sanitation revolutionized hospital best practices and influenced public health systems worldwide.

Throughout her life, Nightingale was an active writer, authoring several books and corresponding with many colleagues and personal friends. Today, her letters and archives are scattered throughout many different libraries and archival collections, including Columbia University, the National Library of Medicine, Boston University, and the Wellcome Collection. Falk Library is lucky enough to hold two original letters written by Florence Nightingale to Alice Stopford Green in 1884.