Florence Nightingale and her era: a collection of new scholarship

VERN BULLOUGH, BONNIE BULLOUGH, and MARIETTA P. STANTON (eds), Florence Nightingale and her era: a collection of new scholarship, New York and London, Garland, 1990, 8vo, pp. xvi. 365, $50.00. This volume, by established and new writers on the history of nursing, is the result of a conference held at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1989. The editors are to be congratulated for the conference itself, and for speedily reproducing a number of papers presented at it. The central theme of the conference and the volume is the life and times of Florence Nightingale, with particular reference to the way her ideas and values were taken up and translated by other nursing leaders and organizations. The final contribution to the volume (a Nightingale bibliography by Bonnie Bullough, Vemn Bullough, and Lilli Sentz) illustrates the vast and growing literature on Nightingale and her role in the development of nursing. The volume is divided into sections, each dealing with an aspect of the concerns and interests that Nightingale scholars have developed. Monica Baly, the foremost Nightingale scholar, examines the usefulness of the Nightingale myths to nursing reformers and to hospital administrators. That theme finds an echo in an important new contribution by Martha Vicinus on Nightingale's use as a role-model for nineteenth century girls, through the many popular "biographies" of Florence Nightingale. Other contributions link Nightingale scholarship and "nightingaleism" to important contemporary social and political issues, including a reappraisal of the suffrage movement and the attitude of some of the nursing leadership to women's issues. Roberta Tierney identifies the significance of the American Civil War to the development of modern nursing in the USA. Unfortunately, the volume does not contain a similar piece on the impact of war on British nursing, although Anne Summers (1989) has made this an important area of study. It is also gratifying to see that nursing history deals with psychiatric as well as general nursing and with education as much as with professionalization. The volume is, at $50.00, badly produced and poorly proof-read (one chapter misspells 'nursing" throughout the page headings). The typeface and typesetting are not conducive to easy reading. These are minor irritations, given the overall satisfaction of seeing a volume devoted to Nightingale scholarship breaking out of the conventional biographical, or hagiographical, approach.