Wilfrid Laurier University Press Florence Nightingale on Public Health Care: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, Volume 6

Review In...the ambitious Collected Works of Florence Nightingale project, series editor Lynn McDonald demonstrates why one of the best-known women of the Victorian Era continues to fascinate, one hundred and fifty years after her initial rise to fame. Until now, the most widely available literature has been written about rather than by Florence Nightingale. Delivering on the promise of convenient access to all the available surviving writing of Florence Nightingale, McDonald offers readers a meticulously transcribed, categorized, and indexed record of Nightingale's major published books, articles, and pamphlets, as well as herefore unpublished correspondence and notes. In Florence Nightingale on Public Health Care and Florence Nightingale's European Travels, Nightingale emerges as a brilliant and politically astute woman who, from her youth, was driven by intellectual mischief, unquenchable curiosity, stubborn resistance to the status quo, and an unrelenting desire to improve the living conditions of the sick poor....Lynn McDonald's extensive yet unobtrusive editorial analyses and comments are invaluable, and serve to contextualize and anchor the disparate documents that follow....Public Health Care and European Travels are invaluable reference texts for scholars interested in Nightingale and her contemporaries, the Victorian era, and the evolution of health care, illness care, and professional nursing. By providing unprecedented access to Nightingale's writings, Lynn McDonald offers readers a unique opportunity to understand Florence Nightingale, in her own words.--Sonya Grypma "University of Toronto Quarterly, Letters in Canada 2004, Volume 75, number 1"Lynn McDonald and her collaborators have taken on a mammoth task: that of collating and organizing ``all the available surviving writing of Florence Nightingale''. The work is a remarkable collective effort....Florence Nightingale on Public Health Care is...a very useful resource for scholars in the fields of history of nursing and history of medicine. As well as providing the reader with carefully edited critical editions of some of Nightingale's most important works, it makes available to future scholarship in these fields a vast array of correspondence, notes and other unpublished material, which will enable a more thorough and complete understanding of Nightingale and her work.--Christine Hallett "Medical History, 50 (3)"The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale is an extremely ambitious project that is a great service to scholarship. Every general academic library should own the complete set. It pulls together material that has been hitherto diffused across more than 150 collections, some of them private ones, in places ranging from Germany to India and Japan, as well as numerous English-speaking countries.--Timothy Larsen "Books and Culture"The Collected Works will allow us to see for the first time the full complexity of this extraordinary and multifacted woman. It will be a tool of enormous value not only to Nightingale scholars and biographers, but also to historians of a wide variety of aspects of Victorian society: war, the army, public health nursing, religion, India, women's issues and so on.--Mark Bostridge "Times Literary Supplement"The details and explications of her views...are presented in carefully annotated and insightful editorial discussions....[These volumes] provide a more complete understanding of this complex woman, extending our appreciation of her much beyond the `The Lady with the Lamp' legend.... The product of rigorous scholarship, of meticulous historical research--and a labour of love.-- "Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, Volume 21/1"The Nightingale project ranks with both the Gladstone diaries and the Disraeli letters as a major undertaking in the field of Victorian-era scholarship, and therefore is of surpassing value to historians of the period, as well as to general readers.--C. Brad Faught "Anglican and Episcopal History, Vol.