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.
Paul Crawford is Professor of Health Humanities in the Faculty of Medicine and HealthSciences at the University of Nottingham, UK.
Anna Greenwood is Associate Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts at the Universityof Nottingham, UK.
Richard Bates is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University ofNottingham, UK.
Jonathan Memel is Lecturer in English Literature in the School of Humanities at Bishop Grosseteste University, UK.
Title: Florence Nightingale at Home
Author: Crawford, Paul
ISBN: 9783030465339
Binding:
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Publication Date: 2020-11-13
Number of Pages: 263
Weight: 0.4446 kg
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)