Florence Nightingale: Extending Nursing

Although Florence Nightingale is famous as a nurse, her lifetime's writing on nursing and to nurses is scarcely known in the profession. Nursing professors tend to ""look to the future, not to the past,"" and often ignore her or rely on faulty secondary sources.

Volume 12 related the founding of her school at St Thomas' Hospital and her guidance of its teaching for the rest of her life. Volume 13, Extending Nursing, relates the introduction of professional training and standards outside St Thomas', beginning with London hospitals and others in Britain, followed by hospitals in Europe, America, Australia and Canada. Also presented is material on work in India, Japan and China. The challenge of raising standards in the tough workhouse infirmaries is reported, as is Nightingale's fostering of district nursing. A chronology in this volume provides a convenient overview of Nightingales work on nursing from 1860 to 1900. Both volumes give biographical sketches of key nursing leaders.

“''The Nightingale project ranks with both the Gladstone diaries and the Disraeli letters as a major undertaking in the field of Victorian-era scholarship, and therefore is of surpassing value to historians of the period, as well as to general readers.''”

The Nightingale project ranks with both the Gladstone diaries and the Disraeli letters as a major undertaking in the field of Victorian-era scholarship, and therefore is of surpassing value to historians of the period, as well as to general readers.'' -- C. Brad Faught, Tyndale University College, Toronto -- Anglican and Episcopal History, Vol. 81 (1), March 2012, 201204<br />The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale is an extremely ambitious project that is a great service to scholarship. Every general academic library should own the complete set. It pulls together material that has been hitherto diffused across more than 150 collections, some of them private ones, in places ranging from Germany to India and Japan, as well as numerous English-speaking countries.'' -- Timothy Larsen -- Books and Culture, November/December 2008, 200901
The details and explications of her views...are presented in carefully annotated and insightful editorial discussions....[These volumes] provide a more complete understanding of this complex woman, extending our appreciation of her much beyond the `The Lady with the Lamp' legend.... The product of rigorous scholarship, of meticulous historical research--and a labour of love.'' -- Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, Volume 21/1, 2004, 200510<br />[I]t is clear that this is an academic project of the highest importance and integrity. It will have an impact on the work of scholars far beyond the immediate field of health history. Nightingale's interests were wide-ranging and her correspondence included some of the leading thinkers of her day....The editing of these volumes is exemplary. Every reference has been followed up, including the identification of minor dramatis personae. Important personalities are accorded short biographies. On every page there are biblical allusions, which are faithfully identified. Each thematic section has an introductory essay and these are amplified by a full outline of Nightingale's life and thought in volume 1. This project makes a major contribution to scholarship which will be of permanent value.'' -- Helen Mathers, University of Sheffield, Ecclesiastical History
Reading this volume was like entering into an intimate relationship with Florence Nightingale and gives amazing glimpses of her drive and motivation and her modus operandi.'' -- Dr Stephanie Kirby, Visiting Research Fellow, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences,University of the West of England, Bristol, UK -- 200910<br />The Collected Works will allow us to see for the first time the full complexity of this extraordinary and multifacted woman. It will be a tool of enormous value not only to Nightgale scholars and biographers, but also to historians of a wide variety of aspects of Victorian society: war, the army, public health nursing, religion, India, women's issues and so on.'' -- Mark Bostridge -- Times Literary Supplement, January 10, 2003, 200310

Lynn McDonald, director of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, is university professor emerita at the University of Guelph. She is an environmentalist, a former member of parliament, a former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, and a long-time activist on womens issues. She has an honorary doctorate from York University.

This volume reports Nightingale's work to take trained nursing from its base at St. Thomas' Hospital in London to other hospitals in London, elsewhere in England, and into Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. It goes on to European countries (initially Sweden and Germany, later France and Italy), to Australia, the United States, Canada, and other countries of the then British Empire. Also featured is material on how Nightingale methods were taken up in Japan and China. This volume relates the difficulty of bringing trained nursing into the abysmal workhouse infirmaries, and it includes a section on the development of 'district nursing', or nursing in the homes of the poor, as well as material on 'health missioners', who taught better health practices at the homes of the rural poor. An appendix gives biographical sketches of major nursing leaders. "Extending Nursing" shows Nightingale promoting the core principles of nursing as a profession, independent of medicine, and providing well-paid career jobs for women. Here the case had to be made politically to a range of elected officials, hospital administrators, and health care reformers. At the same time, Nightingale had to attend to the health and safety of nurses (as well as patients), for hospitals continued to be dangerous places everywhere.

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