Reporting the Crimean War: Misinformation and Misinterpretation

Abstract

There is probably no important event in times past whose historiography is free from misinformation, misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or mistakes; and in this regard the Crimean War is no exception to this rule. The misinformation quoted in this article can be placed in at least one of four principal categories. The first involved either the failure to seek out primary sources for the correct information, or a demonstration of ignorance of military protocol, or the misrepresentation of data which in itself is not necessarily inaccurate. The three other examples are characterized by Samuel Butler’s bon mots that ‘though God cannot alter the past, historians can’. The first of these involved flights of fancy that are clearly absurd; the second comprises unkind and sometimes malicious remarks made without any reference to contemporary documents or reliable secondary sources that might support the assertions made; while the third, and possibly the most serious, was the seemingly deliberate falsification of the facts. The purpose of this article is to provide a selection of the many available examples of these misrepresentations which relate to the medical aspects of the Crimean campaign and to provide responses that hopefully go someway to setting the record straight.

Keywords

• misinformation
• Crimean War
• Florence Nightingale
• Dr Hall
• medical history