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LONDON (Reuters) - Florence Nightingale, the crusading saviour of wounded soldiers who almost single-handedly turned nursing into a respected profession, had a soft side too.

Throughout her eventful life, she surrounded herself with an array of pets from tortoises to chameleons and cats.

But her favourite was a little owl called Athena whom she rescued from stone-throwing youths in Athens in 1850 while returning from Egypt. She kept it with her night and day until it died four years later as she prepared to go the Crimean war.

Now, 94 years after Nightingale's death in 1910, the stuffed Athena has come home to roost at the Florence Nightingale Museum next to St Thomas' Hospital in central London.

"The owl shows her softer side -- that she was not as driven as some people would have us believe," museum director Alex Attewell told Reuters on Thursday.

"When Athena died, Florence wrote 'poor little beastie it is odd how much I loved you,'" he added, noting not only that she often kept Athena in her pocket but that while nursing wounded soldiers in the Crimean war she saw the owl in a vision.

When Nightingale died at the age of 90, the family's summer house Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, including the little stuffed owl and various other personal objects, passed into the hands of a medical charity.

Lea Hurst became a nursing home before being forced to close recently due to the costs of upkeep, and the charity AgeCare has offered the items including the owl to the museum.

"The owl is as much an emblem of Florence Nightingale as is a nurse's uniform. Both show her caring side to perfection," Attewell said.

Nightingale, born in May 1820 into a rich industrialist family in the Italian city after which she was named, was a creature of her time, driven like many of her contemporaries to break the mould of Victorian servile womanhood.

Heeding a call from God and much against the initial wishes of her family she turned to nursing -- a profession that at the time had a reputation for drunkenness and promiscuity.

In 1854 she received a call from the government asking her to assemble a group of nurses to go to the Barrack Hospital at Scutari in northern Turkey to tend the British wounded who survived the 200 mile sea journey back from the Crimea.

It was during this period of recruiting nurses in London that Athena simply pined to death, neglected at the family home.

It is said that when she heard the news, Nightingale burst into tears.

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