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.

The founder of modern nursing comes to life in this accessible biography for young readers. Born and raised in a wealthy family, no one expected Florence Nightingale to grow up to do dirty work. But she found her life's calling after witnessing firsthand the atrocious conditions at hospitals in the mid 1800s. Where everyone else saw unavoidable chaos, Florence saw opportunity for order. She developed strict standards of hygiene and established extensive nurse training. Her new systems significantly lowered death rates and revolutionized the healthcare landscape of her time. When she was thirty-eight years old, Florence contracted Crimean fever and remained homebound for the rest of her life. She continued to fight for nursing reform and sanitary conditions, working from her bed as she met distinguished guests and published papers. This informative entry in Adler's well-known series contains biography, facts, and history accompanied by charming illustrations.

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.

In Florence Nightingale’s day, if a person was sick – and lucky – he or she was nursed at home with caring family members tending the bedside. Hospitals were horrible places from which few emerged alive. The nurses were often drunks and prostitutes. Doctors had rudimentary skills. Thus the privileged Nightingale family was appalled when Florence, who had done her share of household nursing, announced that she wanted to train to work in a hospital. After all, her role was cut out for her: she was to be a decorative, witty lady. A career, much less nursing, was out of the question. It took many years, but Florence found her calling in Crimea. More English soldiers died of sickness there than died in battle. If they were wounded they were almost sure to suffer in misery, lying on pallets caked with old blood, hungry and thirsty, without anyone to offer them so much as a sip of water. Florence caused a revolution in her insistence for cleanliness, wholesome food, and kind treatment of men, who were considered to be nothing more than cannon fodder. Florence’s campaign resulted in reforms to health care for millions of people. Although she was in frail health for much of her life, her sense of outrage and her extraordinary stamina in the face of prejudice and almost criminal ignorance make her story one of the most inspiring in history. Dozens of photographs, posters, and cartoons bring the past to life in this memorable biography.

In this kids' biography, discover the fascinating story of Florence Nightingale, who cared for British soldiers during wartime as the "Lady of the Lamp" and changed the field of nursing. Florence Nightingale was a pioneer of nursing at a time when women were discouraged from working outside the home, especially in the field of science. She saved many lives both on and off the battlefield through implementing a new standard of medical care, and by leading groups of nurses to improve conditions. In this biography for kids ages 8-12, learn all about the inspiring story of Florence Nightingale--social reformer, statistician, and mother of modern nursing who bucked the social norms of her day and changed the world. DK Life Stories go beyond the basic facts to tell the true life stories of history's most interesting people. Full-color photographs and hand-drawn illustrations complement thoughtfully written, age-appropriate text to create an engaging book children will enjoy reading. Definition boxes, information sidebars, fun facts, maps, inspiring quotes, and other nonfiction text features add depth, and a handy reference section at the back makes this series perfect for school reports and projects. Each book also includes an author's introduction letter, a glossary, and an index.

Most people know Florence Nightingale was a compassionate and legendary nurse, but they don’t know her full story. This riveting biography explores the exceptional life of a woman who defied the stifling conventions of Victorian society to pursue what was considered an undesirable vocation. She is best known for her work during the Crimean War, when she vastly improved gruesome and deadly conditions and made nightly rounds to visit patients, becoming known around the world as the Lady with the Lamp. Her tireless and inspiring work continued after the war, and her modern methods in nursing became the defining standards still used today. Includes notes, bibliography, and index.

Originally published: Springhouse, PA: Springhouse Corp., c2000.

Best known as the founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale was also a trailblazer in health science and health statistics, philosophy, political advocacy and reform, environmentalism, evidence-based practice, feminism, holistic nursing, nursing theory, and public health. Her far-reaching legacy is still relevant to modern day healthcare issues. Three renowned holistic nurse scholars join the director of the Florence Nightingale Museum to present a portrait of this remarkable woman. Interpreting Nightingale's life and work by the principles of healing, leadership, and global action, the authors identify and discuss the ways in which her work, both practical and visionary, can yet rejuvenate nurses, nursing, and health care worldwide. ... Publilsher description.

Florence Nightingale was for a time the most famous woman in Britain–if not the world. We know her today primarily as a saintly character, perhaps as a heroic reformer of Britain’s health-care system. The reality is more involved and far more fascinating. In an utterly beguiling narrative that reads like the best Victorian fiction, acclaimed author Gillian Gill tells the story of this richly complex woman and her extraordinary family. Born to an adoring wealthy, cultivated father and a mother whose conventional facade concealed a surprisingly unfettered intelligence, Florence was connected by kinship or friendship to the cream of Victorian England’s intellectual aristocracy. Though moving in a world of ease and privilege, the Nightingales came from solidly middle-class stock with deep traditions of hard work, natural curiosity, and moral clarity. So it should have come as no surprise to William Edward and Fanny Nightingale when their younger daughter, Florence, showed an early passion for helping others combined with a precocious bent for power. Far more problematic was Florence’s inexplicable refusal to marry the well-connected Richard Monckton Milnes. As Gill so brilliantly shows, this matrimonial refusal was at once an act of religious dedication and a cry for her freedom–as a woman and as a leader. Florence’s later insistence on traveling to the Crimea at the height of war to tend to wounded soldiers was all but incendiary–especially for her older sister, Parthenope, whose frustration at being in the shade of her more charismatic sibling often led to illness. Florence succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. But at the height of her celebrity, at the age of thirty-seven, she retired to her bedroom and remained there for most of the rest of her life, allowing visitors only by appointment. Combining biography, politics, social history, and consummate storytelling, Nightingales is a dazzling portrait of an amazing woman, her difficult but loving family, and the high Victorian era they so perfectly epitomized. Beautifully written, witty, and irresistible, Nightingales is truly a tour de force.