Authors:
- Winner of the 2021/2022 People's Book Prize Best Achievement Award
- First book to explore the importance of the home to Florence Nightingale’s life and work
- Contributes to the growing body of work on the theme and meaning of the ‘home’ in research across the humanities
- Analyses primary source material not usually consulted, with access to a searchable, six million word collection of Nightingale’s correspondence and further unpublished archival material
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
Winner of the 2021/2022 People's Book Prize Best Achievement Award
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.
Reviews
“Florence Nightingale at Home makes a strong case for renewed attention to Nightingale’s career as a nursing pioneer and as an imperial sanitary reformer. … The book … demonstrates the importance of the notion of domesticity for rethinking and rescaling analyses of social bodies, nations, empires … ecologies.” (Richard Bonfiglio, Victorian Studies, Vol. 65 (1), 2022)
“The depth of research is admirable: this book draws on materials within the Nightingale family archive and is also the first major study to be able to use all sixteen volumes of Lynn McDonald’s Collected Works of Florence Nightingale … . This book is a valuable read for scholars of Nightingale and those working more broadly on the history of medicine and Victorian domesticity, as well as the public with an interest in this famous historical figure.” (Charlotte Wilson, BAVS Newsletter, Vol. 23 (2), 2023)
“This latest book on Nightingale makes an insightful contribution to the existing literature on the world’s most well-known nurse, being the first to explore her domestic experiences and how the theme of home influenced her writings and work.” (David Stewart, nottinghamnursinghistory.wordpress.com, July 7, 2021)
“Part of the pleasure in reading this thoughtful and well-executed collaborative work is the way in which the received narrative boundaries have been dissolved. … For any student of Nightingale, or of gender and health in the nineteenth century, the authors offer a wonderfully detailed discussion of the past 40 years of scholarship assembled along the lines of home and domesticity.” (Sioban Nelson, Social History of Medicine, March 12, 2021)
“This is the most important study of Florence Nightingale’s life and work for a generation. Using newly available sources, the authors set her firmly within the political, cultural and spiritual life of Victorian Britain as someone who both transcended and reflected the roles traditionally available to women of her class.” (Professor Robert Dingwall, Nottingham Trent University, UK)
“This brilliant book deftly uses the device of ‘home’ to interrogate the life and achievements of Florence Nightingale. By doing so it brings a new interpretive lens on the role that ‘home’ played in her reform efforts and breathes new life into this ever fascinating nurse and cultural icon.” (Professor Anne-Marie Rafferty CBE, Royal College of Nursing, UK)
“Florence Nightingale At Home is a remarkable achievement, and the authors are to be congratulated on so effectively locating Nightingale in the context of her time. This book is not only an invaluable source for historians of women, nursing, medicine, public health and Victorian Britain; it is also an elegant and absorbing ‘read’ for a more general audience.” (Professor Christine Hallett, University of Huddersfield, UK)
“This book is not only scholarly and accurate, but has excellent visuals and is wonderfully readable. The authors use the ‘home’ theme to present material from the Crimean War and press coverage of it, her faith and the pioneering research she did from her own home post-Crimea.” (Professor Lynn McDonald, University of Guelph, Canada)
“A fascinating insight into some of the most personal yet valuable areas of Nightingale’s life, this book will be a welcome addition to the library of any Nightingale enthusiast. The unique and timely focus of this book makes for a compelling read. It is a book marked by passion and dedication.” (David Green, Florence Nightingale Museum, UK)
“This highly original book is not a typical biography. It provides a fascinating insight and a renewed understanding of Florence Nightingale through her varying experiences of home. The authors effectively demonstrate how changing ideas of home continually shaped Nightingale’s attitudes and work, both in Britain and abroad.” (Dr. Vicky Holmes, Queen Mary University of London, UK)
Authors and Affiliations
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School of Health Sciences, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Paul Crawford
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Department of History, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Anna Greenwood, Richard Bates
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Department of English, Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK
Jonathan Memel
About the authors
Sciences at the University of Nottingham, UK.
Anna Greenwood is Associate Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts at the University
of Nottingham, UK.
Richard Bates is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of
Nottingham, UK.
Jonathan Memel is Lecturer in English Literature in the School of Humanities at Bishop Grosseteste University, UK.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Florence Nightingale at Home
Authors: Paul Crawford, Anna Greenwood, Richard Bates, Jonathan Memel
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46534-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-46533-9Published: 13 November 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-46534-6Published: 13 November 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 263
Number of Illustrations: 10 b/w illustrations, 14 illustrations in colour
Topics: Popular Science in History, Social History, History of Medicine, Culture and Gender, Cultural History, History of Science