Was Florence Nightingale just "the lady with the lamp"?
The nursing image is the least important thing about her. Nightingale's enduring contribution was statistical and administrative — she was a pioneering data analyst who used evidence to force reform of military and public health, and the lamp is a piece of Victorian iconography that obscures it.
What happened at Scutari. She arrived at the British military hospital in the Crimean War in 1854 with a party of nurses and found conditions that were appalling — overcrowding, no sanitation, contaminated water and inadequate supplies. Mortality was extraordinarily high.
The uncomfortable complication, which she herself came to understand: mortality initially rose after her arrival. The fundamental problem was the building — sewers beneath it, no ventilation — and deaths fell dramatically only after a Sanitary Commission arrived in 1855 and rebuilt the drains. She concluded afterwards that she had misread the cause at the time, and that realisation drove the rest of her career.
What she did with it. Back in Britain she assembled mortality data and argued that most deaths were from preventable disease rather than wounds — a claim that was politically unwelcome. To make it undeniable she used statistical graphics, including the polar area diagram, or "coxcomb", that shows preventable deaths as coloured wedges dwarfing combat deaths. It is one of the earliest and most effective uses of a chart to change government policy.
Her actual legacy:
Hospital design — ventilation, light, separation of wards, water supply — codified in her influential Notes on Hospitals.
Professional nursing, through the training school at St Thomas', which made nursing a trained occupation rather than a menial one.
Public health reform in Britain and in British India, where she campaigned for decades on sanitation without ever visiting.
She was elected the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society, which is the recognition that fits her best.
She spent much of her later life bedbound, working from home through correspondence and reports.