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NIGHTINGALE, PUBLIC HEALTH AND VICTORIAN SOCIETY
from the British Library, London

Part 1: Correspondence relating to the Crimea, India and Public Health Reform

"Microfilm publication of Florence Nightingale's original letters is good news for scholars. It will make available a substantial portion of the best collection in the world, that of the British Library."

Lynn McDonald, Consultant Editor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Guelph 
Editor of 'The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale'
(Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2003)

Florence Nightingale is one of the great icons of the Victorian Age. Yet there is much more to her than the image of the Lady with the Lamp would suggest. Yes, she was a driving force in the development of nursing as a profession, and she was involved in wider issues of public health, but she was also an indefatigable, intelligent and percipient reformer with interests ranging from religion to empire and womens role in society.

This microfilm collection is based on the British Library's outstanding collection of Nightingales correspondence and literary manuscripts. It is the largest collection of Nightingale papers in the world, consisting of around 180 volumes, although some papers can be found in archives and private collections elsewhere. This collection will include all the Nightingale volumes held at the British Library with the exception of around twenty which contain miscellaneous letters. We have also taken the opportunity to include important family correspondence not previously catalogued by Goldie and largely unknown to scholars.

Part 1 contains Florence Nightingale's correspondence relating to public health reform, India and the Crimea. She was a prodigious letter-writer and there is a mass of correspondence with leading figures of her time concerning public health reform. Included are letters to Sidney Herbert, Fox Maule and John Joseph Frederick of the War Office and members of the staff of the Army Medical School such as Edmund Alexander Parkes, Professor of Hygeine, William Aitken, Professor of Pathology and Thomas Longmore, Professor of Military Surgery. There are many letters to leading figures in sanitary reform such as Dr John Sutherland, Sir Robert Rawlinson who headed the sanitary commission sent to the Crimea in 1855 and Sir Edwin Chadwick. There are also letters to influential holders of public office such as Lt-Colonel John Henry Lefroy, William Farr, Superintendent of Statistics at the General Register Office and Sir John McNeill, surgeon and diplomatist.

 A large section covers her letters with Captain Sir Douglas Strutt Galton, Assistant Under-Secretary for War and Director of Public Works and Buildings. In the following letter, dated April 1891, discussing plans for Derby Infirmary she shows her indomitable strength of character:

I had a curious & rather unsatisfactory two hours talk with Mr Keith Young on Saturday. He was noisily complimentary & silently obstinate. I doubt his adopting any suggestions.

(He is attached to the Middlesex Hospital, one of the few that has still a laundry under the Wards. And he swears by Miss Shorold, the Matron, who has never been a Trained Nurse).

His hospital, excellent in sanitary points, is, according to our ideas, perfectly unworkable. But you are going to speak at the County Meeting at Derby on Thursday. And this appears to me the only chance of getting any alterations, now, made. I venture to send you my notes of which I wrote the first 8 pages before I had seen him the latter after I had seen him. Mr Young is not going down to the Thursday meeting. His knowledge of what a woman & a nurse is was conspicuous from its absence.

The holes & corners, the labyrinth of rooms at the mouth of each Ward are obviously Mr Youngs own pet plan. And he wont give it up.

Help me if you can. I am most truly, F Nightingale

Letters are also included from Florences sister Parthenope. Her letters give us an insight into Nightingales character and how her time in the Crimea had affected her. In a letter to Mrs Sidney Herbert, Parthenope gives us a vivid account of the state of Florences health on her return from the Crimea:

Our dear one is home at last. They came back as quietly and as rapidly as they could, to avoid the receptions & greetings with which she is threatened, & which you know are little to her taste.. She looks well in the face & seems well for a few hours in the morning, then she sinks down quite wearied out for the rest of the day we are most anxious to give her the breathing time which alone can restore her to a chance of work for the future. We see how little she feels equal to anything of the kind at present. She feels quite worn out at heart and absolute quiet is all that she desires.

Of particular interest are the letters Florence Nightingale wrote to the wives of leading figures. Included in this part is her correspondence with Mary Elizabeth Herbert, Laura Rolfe, Selina Holte Bracebridge, Elizabeth Sutherland, Marianne Strutt Galton and Elizabeth McNeill.

In a letter to Mary Elizabeth Herbert in 1863 after the death of her husband, Sidney Herbert, Minister of War, Florence comments on the signing of the Indian Sanitary Commission
Report:

Dearest

. This day week, after four years heavy work (how much those four years have done!) the Indian Sanitary Commission signed their Report, begun by him. There were three days of as sharp fighting as the Americans, to carry a clause which I was determined should be carried on the Report not sined, viz. to have a working Commission at home, after the fashion of his, to carry out the reforms indicated in the Report.

It is curious that people should think a Report self-executive, - should not see that, when the Report is finished, the work begins. It was his glory to have introduced this new fashion of working Reports. And upon his name we carried it.

God bless you. Ever yours Florence Nightingale

This part also contains Nightingales correspondence with Queen Victoria, Queen Alexandra and with Queen Victorias daughters - Princess Alice Maud Mary, wife of Frederick William Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt and Louisa Mary Elizabeth, wife of Frederick William Louis, Grand Duke of Baden.

Material concerning India includes her correspondence with the Viceroys of India Sir John Laird Mair Lawrence, George Frederick Samuel Robinson and Henry Charles Keith
Petty-FitzMaurice and the Secretaries of State for India, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil and Sir Stafford Henry Northcote. Also included is correspondence with prominent members of Indian Sanitary Commissions such as Edward Henry Stanley, President of the Indian Army Sanitary Commission, James Pattison Walker, Secretary to the Bengal Sanitary Commission, Thomas Gillham Hewlett, Health Officer of Bombay and Robert Staunton Ellis, Chief Secretary to the Madras Government.

The following letter, written in September 1864 concerning the Bengal Sanitary
Commission, is from Nightingale to Sir John Laird Mair Lawrence, Viceroy of India:

My dear Sir John Lawrence

I always feel it is a kind of presumption in me to write to you and a kind of wonder at your permitting it. I always feel that you are the greatest figure in history, and yours the greatest work in history, in modern times. But that is my very reason. We have but one Sir John Lawrence.

Your Bengal Sanitary Commission is doing its work, like men, - like martyrs, in fact. And what a work it is! All we have in Europe is mere childs play to it Health is the produce of civilisation ie of real civilisation. In Europe we have a kind of civilisation to proceed upon. In India your work represents not only diminished mortality, as with us, but increase of
energy, increase of power, of the populations. I always feel as if God had said:  mankind is to create mankind. In this sense, you are the greatest creator of mankind in modern history.

Your Bengal Commission must be the model of the other Presidency Sanitary Commissions. I see that, on the Bombay one, is no Civil Member. And so far as I know of its proceedings, it seems to direct its attention not so much to sanitary works as to matters of ordinary police. Now the main business of your Sanitary Commissions should be: construction, not police. Improvement in India mainly depends on works (police regulations are, of course, necessary.

Fascinating material for the Crimea includes her autobiographical memoranda, reports on her Crimean nurses and her accompt books during the Crimean War. Included also are her letters giving details on the soldiers who died in her care.

In the letter below written at Castle Hospital, Balaclava, November 1855 she describes the last days of Morris Jones of the Light Infantry:

Morris Jones, 13th Light Infantry, died at the Barrack Hospital, Scutari, Ward 8, Corridor F, of Fever, August 20 1855. He was only in Hospital three days. He had an abcess in his neck & spoke very little. At 10pm the night he died, he was sufficiently conscious to express pleasure at having the Nurse there tho he always called her Mother. He would take no food from anyone else. He appeared to rest satisfied in this delusion which comforted him. He was far too little
conscious to send any message to his family.

He was very cold & and had hot water tins put round him which annoyed him - & he insisted upon pushing them away.

He was too ill when he entered Hospital for any questions to be asked him.

The nurse called him her old man - & when it was ascertained that he was only 32 years of age, would not believe it. But our men are old at 32.

I regret that the anxiety of his family should have been not sooner ended.

But I am myself confined to my bed by illness & here I have no one to write for me.

If it is any consolation to his family to know that he was not neglected, but had every care that Medical skill & female nursing could give him, they may be certain of this..

Correspondence with nurses includes: Jane Catherine Shaw Stewart, a Crimean nurse, later Lady Superintendent of Netley Hospital, Sybil Airy, an Army nurse later Matron of the Royal Victoria Hospital, Bournemouth and Amy E Hawthorn, a nurse during the First Boer War.

Jane Catherine Shaw Stewart reports in her letter of November 1869 on her first difficult days as Lady Superintendent at Netley Hospital:

Dear Miss Nightingale

Having been here a week I write to let you know how we are getting on. Everyone about the place shows an earnest desire to aid me to the utmost and, with the willing assistance I have on all sides I find the newness of my work loses much of its difficulty. I wish I could report the sisters equal to their responsibilities. I must only trust that they will after a time rise to them. Already Sister Lennox has given in, she was confined to her room from Thursday till yesterday more from nervousness than illness. This is the more to be regretted as she was wanted for an amputation case which she should have attended. The absence from work of one of our number is seriously felt.

This microfilm collection will allow the researcher to understand Florence Nightingales work during the Crimean War and her lifelong battle to revolutionise the image of the nurse and bring about public health reforms. It will be of enormous value to scholars researching many aspects of Victorian society: nursing, war, the army, public health, the role and influence of women, religion, events in India and perceptions of Empire.



  Highlights
Description
Contents
Editorial introduction
Digital Guide
 
 
 
 
 
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