<P> Stephen Paget in the Dictionary of National Biography asserted that Nightingale reduced the death rate from 42% to 2%, either by making improvements in hygiene herself, or by calling for the Sanitary Commission . For example, Nightingale implemented handwashing and other hygiene practices in the war hospital in which she worked . </P> <P> During her first winter at Scutari, 4,077 soldiers died there . Ten times more soldiers died from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds . With overcrowding, defective sewers and lack of ventilation, the Sanitary Commission had to be sent out by the British government to Scutari in March 1855, almost six months after Nightingale had arrived . The commission flushed out the sewers and improved ventilation . Death rates were sharply reduced, but she never claimed credit for helping to reduce the death rate . In 2001 and 2008 the BBC released documentaries that were critical of Nightingale's performance in the Crimean War, as were some follow - up articles published in The Guardian and the Sunday Times . Nightingale scholar Lynn McDonald has dismissed these criticisms as "often preposterous", arguing they are not supported by the primary sources . </P> <P> Nightingale still believed that the death rates were due to poor nutrition, lack of supplies, stale air and overworking of the soldiers . After she returned to Britain and began collecting evidence before the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, she came to believe that most of the soldiers at the hospital were killed by poor living conditions . This experience influenced her later career, when she advocated sanitary living conditions as of great importance . Consequently, she reduced peacetime deaths in the army and turned her attention to the sanitary design of hospitals and the introduction of sanitation in working - class homes (see Statistics and Sanitary Reform, below). </P> <P> During the Crimean war, Nightingale gained the nickname "The Lady with the Lamp" from a phrase in a report in The Times: </P>

What were the greatest contributions of the lady of the lamp