Florence Nightingale Museum museum explains her legacy and also celebrates nursing today: it is a member of The London Museums of Health & Medicine group. In 1860, four years after her famous involvement in the Crimean War, Nightingale founded the Nightingale Training School for nurses at St. Thomas' Hospital and the museum is located on this site. The new museum is designed around three pavilions that tell her story. The Gilded Cage tells the story of Nightingale's privileged childhood and her struggle against stifling social conventions. The Calling shows how Nightingale and her team coped with the crisis in the military hospitals where
Florence Nightingale she [Nightingale] started out there was no such thing as nursing. The Dickens character Sarah Gamp, who was more interested in drinking gin than looking after her patients, was only a mild exaggeration. Hospitals were places of last resort where the floors were laid with straw to soak up the blood. Florence transformed nursing when she got back [from Crimea]. She had access to people in high places and she used it to get things done. Florence was stubborn, opinionated and forthright but she had to be those things in order to achieve all that she did." Though Nightingale is