A family album featuring unseen drawings of Florence Nightingale is to go on public display for the first time at a show hoping to shine new light on a figure whose name is world famous.

Nightingale, the lady with the lamp, the founding figure of modern nursing, was someone who “is known but not known”, said David Green, director of London’s Florence Nightingale Museum.

“Most people in the world have heard of Florence Nightingale, but they don’t really know her full story,” he said.

The 200th anniversary of her birth has prompted the museum to shine light on different aspects of her life in an exhibition of 200 objects.

They include a family album which was started by Nightingale’s aunt, Ann Elizabeth Nicholson, and passed down through family generations before becoming buried in papers.

It was unearthed last year and loaned to the museum. It includes drawings and watercolour sketches, including a small number of Nightingale.

Florence Nightingale’s family album, filled with paintings and drawings. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

Also on display for the first time is a gold watch, given to Nightingale by her father, which she wore throughout her service in the Crimean war. She gave it away because she was largely bed-ridden in later years. “I do not use a watch now, for I am not movable,” she said.

That shines light on the less well-known side of Nightingale’s life: her physical and mental health struggles. She contracted what is now understood to be brucellosis, which causes fatigue and muscle pain. It turned her into a recluse in her Mayfair home. “That is bound to have had an effect on her mental health,” said Green.

“There is also a very real chance she had post-traumatic stress disorder. She was working in filthy, rat-infested conditions, sanitation was appalling and there were soldiers on the ground, often needing amputations.

“Possibly more challenging was dealing with the fame which went with her success,” said Green. Because of Crimea she became a hero, the second most famous person in the British empire, and she hated it. “She did not want the adulation and she struggled with it.”

The Turkish ‘fanoos’ lamp carried by Florence Nightingale during the Crimean war will go on display. Photograph: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

The exhibition will reveal misunderstandings and inaccuracies, such as the lamp carried by Nightingale in the depiction of her on the old £10 note, which was in circulation until 1994. It shows her with a genie-style lamp which had a candle in it rather than the folded Turkish lantern, or “fanoos”, she carried.

The actual lamp will be on display, as will a new Florence Barbie doll that carries the correct lamp.

Other exhibits include the door knocker from her house in Mayfair, visited by luminaries of the Victorian era, including Prime Minister William Gladstone and Charles Dickens.

Green said: “If they were lucky she would see them because there were plenty of times she sent people away, either because she wasn’t in the mood or she wanted to get on with her work.

“She was important enough she could do that. People would still come back. When she spoke, people listened.”

One of the most curious objects is Nightingale’s pet owl Athena, which she acquired on a visit to the Acropolis in Greece. Seeing that the owl was being tormented by a group of boys, she scooped it up and took it with her on her travels.

It became her constant companion and would sit on her shoulder, but it soon died. Nightingale had it stuffed and it was later displayed in the home of her sister Parthenope who wrote a book The Life and Death of Athena an Owlet from the Parthenon.

• Nightingale in 200 Objects, People & Places: Leader, Icon and Pioneer, is at the Florence Nightingale Museum in the grounds of St Thomas’ hospital, London.