Florence Nightingale was no angel, says ex-boss

London: Florence Nightingale was nothing like the selfless, saint-like woman that she was built up to be, unpublished letters of one of her contemporaries claim.

Florence, better known as the Lady of the Lamp, was raised to almost saint-like levels for her work as a nurse during the Crimean War.

However, according to Sir John Hall, Head of Medical Services from 1854-56, she was a domineering, bossy, bloody-minded and self-promoting woman who not only was "an ambitious struggling after power, inimical to the interests of the medical department," but also a "petticoat imperieuse in the Medical imperio!"

Hall's letters, contained in a dog-eared marbled letterbook in which he kept copies of the correspondence he sent, mostly to his superiors, were recently auctioned at Bonhams to the Wellcome Trust for 4,000 pounds.

They clearly show that Florence Nightingale clashed with the male-dominated world of medicine, and was seen as a threat to the establishment.

"There was a culture clash. Hall's background was the rumbustious, male-dominated world of Wellington's army; whereas in her you get Victorian upper-middle-class morality," the Daily Mail quoted Richard Aspin, head of the Wellcome Trust's archive and manuscripts, as saying.

"One of the interesting things these letters reveal is that Florence Nightingale didn't really play by the rules.

"She was a formidable personality and I think the male medical establishment really had no idea of what it was up against."

In his letters, Hall blasts Florence for the way she carried out her work in Turkey during the Crimean War.

Conditions in Scutari were appalling: there were vermin and fleas and the rotting corpse of a Russian army officer in her living quarters when she arrived.

The hospital was desperately overcrowded and poor sanitation meant the place was filthy.

And it was with a will of iron that Nightingale set about improving conditions at the hospital.

She ordered scrubbing brushes to clean the wards, sent patients' clothes to be washed and insisted that no woman but her should patrol the patients' beds after 8pm.

However, as she gained popularity back home, she infuriated Sir John Hall as her star rose at his expense.

He therefore warns in his letters that "If not resisted (Florence) will, with the influence she has at home throw us completely into the shade in future, as we are at present overlooked in everything that is good and beneficial regarding our hospital arrangements, which are ascribed utterly to her presiding genius by a great part of the press and her own itinerant eulogistic orators."

Aspin points out, "Here we have as close as we're ever going to get to the real raw, inner feelings of a proud man whose world was turned upside down by a female interloper."

Hall's papers will be held by the Wellcome library, and available for the public to look at.