Florence Nightingale On Social Change In India

Social Change in India shows the shift of focus that occurred during Florence Nightingale’s more than forty years of work on public health in India. While the focus in the preceding volume, Health in India, was top-down reform, notably in the Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India, this book documents concrete proposals for self-government, especially at the municipal level, and the encouragement of leading Indian nationals themselves. Famine and related epidemics continue to be issues, demonstrating the need for public works like irrigation and for greater self-help measures like “health missioners” and self-government. The book includes sections on village and town sanitation, the condition and status of women, land tenure, rent reform, and education and political evolution toward self-rule. Nightingale’s publications on these subjects appeared increasingly in Indian journals. Correspondence shows Nightingale continuing to work behind the scenes, pressing viceroys, governors, and Cabinet ministers to take up the cause of sanitary reform. Her collaboration with Lord Ripon, viceroy 1880-84, was crucial, for he was a great promoter of Indian self-government. Social Change in India features much new material, including a substantial number of long-missing letters to Lady Dufferin, wife of the viceroy 1884-88, on the provision of medical care for women in India, health education, and the promotion of women doctors. Biographical sketches of major collaborators, a glossary of Indian terms, and a list of Indian place names are also provided. Currently, Volumes 1 to 11 are available in e-book version by subscription or from university and college libraries through the following vendors: Canadian Electronic Library, Ebrary, MyiLibrary, and Netlibrary.

This volume shows the shift of focus that occurred during Florence Nightingale's 40-plus years of work on public health in India. It documents her concrete proposals for self-government, especially at the municipal level, and the encouragement of leading Indian nationals themselves.

Social Change in India shows the shift of focus that occurred during Florence Nightingale’s more than forty years of work on public health in India. While the focus in the preceding volume, Health in India, was top-down reform, notably in the Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India, this book documents concrete proposals for self-government, especially at the municipal level, and the encouragement of leading Indian nationals themselves. Famine and related epidemics continue to be issues, demonstrating the need for public works like irrigation and for greater self-help measures like “health missioners” and self-government. The book includes sections on village and town sanitation, the condition and status of women, land tenure, rent reform, and education and political evolution toward self-rule. Nightingale’s publications on these subjects appeared increasingly in Indian journals. Correspondence shows Nightingale continuing to work behind the scenes, pressing viceroys, governors, and Cabinet ministers to take up the cause of sanitary reform. Her collaboration with Lord Ripon, viceroy 1880-84, was crucial, for he was a great promoter of Indian self-government. Social Change in India features much new material, including a substantial number of long-missing letters to Lady Dufferin, wife of the viceroy 1884-88, on the provision of medical care for women in India, health education, and the promotion of women doctors. Biographical sketches of major collaborators, a glossary of Indian terms, and a list of Indian place names are also provided. Currently, Volumes 1 to 11 are available in e-book version by subscription or from university and college libraries through the following vendors: Canadian Electronic Library, Ebrary, MyiLibrary, and Netlibrary.

Florence Nightingale is famous as the “lady with the lamp” in the Crimean War, 1854—56. There is a massive amount of literature on this work, but, as editor Lynn McDonald shows, it is often erroneous, and films and press reporting on it have been even less accurate. The Crimean War reports on Nightingale’s correspondence from the war hospitals and on the staggering amount of work she did post-war to ensure that the appalling death rate from disease (higher than that from bullets) did not recur. This volume contains much on Nightingale’s efforts to achieve real reforms. Her well-known, and relatively “sanitized”, evidence to the royal commission on the war is compared with her confidential, much franker, and very thorough Notes on the Health of the British Army, where the full horrors of disease and neglect are laid out, with the names of those responsible.

Florence Nightingale on Society and Politics, Philosophy, Science, Education and Literature, Volume 5 in the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, is the main source of Nightingale’s work on the methodology of social science and her views on social reform. Here we see how she took her “call to service” into practice: by first learning how the laws of God’s world operate, one can then determine how to intervene for good. There is material on medical statistics, the census, pauperism and Poor Law reform, the need for income security measures and better housing, on crime, gender and the family. Her comments on a new edition of The Dialogues of Plato are given, with their impact on the revision of the next edition. We see Nightingale’s condemnation of Plato’s “community of wives,” with her stirring approval of love (even outside marriage!), marriage and the family. In this volume also her views on natural science, education and literature are reported. Nightingale was an astute behind-the-scenes political activist. Society and Politics publishes (much of it for the first time) her correspondence with such leading political figures as Queen Victoria, W.E. Gladstone and J.S. Mill. There are notes and essays on public administration and personal observations on various members of royalty, prime ministers and ministers, and Indian viceroys. Nightingale’s support of the vote for women (contrary to much in the secondary literature) is here shown. Correspondence and notes on British general elections from 1834 to 1900 is reported, with letters to and for (Liberal) political candidates and fierce condemnations of Conservatives. Currently, Volumes 1 to 11 are available in e-book version by subscription or from university and college libraries through the following vendors: Canadian Electronic Library, Ebrary, MyiLibrary, and Netlibrary.

Mysticism and Eastern Religions, the fourth volume in the Collected Works and the third on Nightingale’s religion, begins with the publication for the first time of Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Devotional Authors of the Middle Ages, translations from and comments on the medieval (and some later) mystics who nourished her own life of faith. Next come her annotations of and comments on the Imitation of Christ, a book to which she turned in times of distress. The largest part of the volume consists of her Letters from Egypt, written 1849-50, a significant period in her own intellectual and spiritual development. Here we provide (for the first time) complete publication and include (also for the first time) material preparatory for the trip and reflections on it over the later years. The last section reports Nightingale’s correspondence and journal notes on Eastern religions, mainly Hinduism. Currently, Volumes 1 to 11 are available in e-book version by subscription or from university and college libraries through the following vendors: Canadian Electronic Library, Ebrary, MyiLibrary, and Netlibrary.

Victorian Medicine and Social Reform traces Florence Nightingale s career as a reformer and Crimean war heroine. Her fame as a social activist and her writings including Notes on Nursing and Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army influenced novelists such as Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot. Their novels of social realism, in turn, influenced Nightingale's later essays on poverty and Indian famine. This study draws original conclusions on the relationship between Nightingale s work and its historical context, gender politics, and such twenty-first-century analogues as celebrity activists Angelina Jolie, Al Gore, and Nicole Kidman.

Florence Nightingale began working on hospital reform even before she founded her famous school of nursing; hospitals were dangerous places for nurses as well as patients, and they urgently needed fundamental reform. She continued to work on safer hospital design, location, and materials to the end of her working life, advising on plans for children’s, general, military, and convalescent hospitals and workhouse infirmaries. Florence Nightingale and Hospital Reform, the final volume in the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, includes her influential Notes on Hospitals, with its much-quoted musing on the need of a Hippocratic oath for hospitals—namely, that first they should do the sick no harm. Nightingale’s anonymous articles on hospital design are printed here also, as are later encyclopedia entries on hospitals. Correspondence with architects, engineers, doctors, philanthropists, local notables, and politicians is included. The results of these letters, some with detailed critiques of hospital plans, can be seen initially in the great British examples of the new “pavilion” design—at St. Thomas’, London (a civil hospital), at the Herbert Hospital (military), and later at many hospitals throughout the UK and internationally. Nightingale’s insistence on keeping good statistics to track rates of mortality and hospital stays, and on using them to compare hospitals, can be seen as good advice for today, given the new versions of “hospital-acquired infections” she combatted.