Florence Nightingale at Home

by Paul Crawford, Anna Greenwood (Contributor), Richard Bates (Contributor)

Homes can be both comforting and troubling places. This timely book proposes a new understanding of Florence Nightingale’s experiences of domestic life and how ideas of home influenced her writings and pioneering work. From her childhood homes in Derbyshire and Hampshire, she visited the poor sick in their cottages. As a young woman, feeling imprisoned at home, she broke free to become a woman of action, bringing home comforts to the soldiers in the Crimean War and advising the British population on the home front how to create healthier, contagion-free homes. Later, she created Nightingale Homes for nursing trainees and acted as mother-in-chief to her extended family of nurses. These efforts, inspired by her Christian faith and training in human care from religious houses, led to major changes in professional nursing and public health, as Nightingale strove for homely, compassionate care in Britain and around the world. Shedid most of this work from her bed after contracting the debilitating illness, brucellosis, in the Crimea, turning her various private homes into offices and ‘households of faith’. In the year of the bicentenary of her birth, she remains as relevant as ever, achieving an astonishing cultural afterlife.

284 pages, Paperback

Published November 13, 2020

Reviews

[Carolyn Castelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

I heard one of the authors speak about this book (I believe it was Richard Bates) and the authors' research during an American Association of the History of Nursing webinar. I've been a nurse over 40 years and never realized the connections to home management of the Victorian era that influenced Nightingale's view of ward management and nurses training. I also found it interesting that Florence N's writings: Notes on Nursing, were primarily aimed at homemakers.

I enjoyed the theme of "home" as it related to much of Nightingale's personal life, war work, religious beliefs, and nursing career. It is well researched and documented. I recommend this book for nurses and others interested in roles of women in the Victorian era.