Notes On Hospitals

Notes on Hospitals by Florence Nightingale, first published in 1863, is a rare manuscript, the original residing in one of the great libraries of the world. This book is a reproduction of that original, which has been scanned and cleaned by state-of-the-art publishing tools for better readability and enhanced appreciation. Restoration Editors' mission is to bring long out of print manuscripts back to life. Some smudges, annotations or unclear text may still exist, due to permanent damage to the original work. We believe the literary significance of the text justifies offering this reproduction, allowing a new generation to appreciate it.

Outspoken writings by the founder of modern nursing record fundamentals in the needs of the sick that must be provided in all nursing. Covers such timeless topics as ventilation, noise, food, more.

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 remains an inspiration to nurses around the world for her pioneering work treating wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War; authorship of Notes on Nursing, the foundational text for nursing practice; establishment of the world's first nursing school; and advocacy for the hygienic treatment of patients and sanitary design of hospitals. In Notes on Nightingale, nursing historians and scholars offer their valuable reflections on Nightingale and analysis of her role in the profession a century after her death on 13 August 1910 and 150 years since the Nightingale School of Nursing (now the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery at King's College, London) opened its doors to probationers at St Thomas' Hospital. There is a great deal of controversy about Nightingale—opinions about her life and work range from blind worship to blanket denunciation. The question of Nightingale and her place in nursing history and in contemporary nursing discourse is a topic of continuing interest for nursing students, teachers, and professional associations. This book offers new scholarship on Nightingale's work in the Crimea and the British colonies and her connection to the emerging science of statistics, as well as valuable reevaluations of her evolving legacy and the surrounding myths, symbolism, and misconceptions.

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.