Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It is Not

Publisher Marketing: Notes on NursingWhat It Is, And What It Is NotBy Florence NightingaleNotes on Nursing: What it is and What it is Not is a book first published by Florence Nightingale in 1859. A 136-page volume, it was intended to give hints on nursing to those entrusted with the health of others. Florence Nightingale stressed that it was not meant to be a comprehensive guide from which to teach one's self to be a nurse but to help in the practice of treating others. In her introduction to the 1974 edition, Joan Quixley, then head of the Nightingale School of Nursing, wrote that despite the passage of time since Notes on Nursing was published, "the book astonishes one with its relevance to modern attitudes and skills in nursing, whether this be practised at home by the 'ordinary woman', in hospital or in the community. The social, economic and professional differences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in no way hinder the young student or pupil from developing, if he or she is motivated to do so, its unchanged fundamentals by way of intelligent thought and practice." "With its mid-nineteenth century background of poverty, neglect, ignorance and prejudice the book was a challenge to contemporary views of nursing, of nurses and of the patient." "The book was the first of its kind ever to be written. It appeared at a time when the simple rules of health were only beginning to be known, when its topics were of vital importance not only for the well-being and recovery of patients, when hospitals were riddled with infection, when nurses were still mainly regarded as ignorant, uneducated persons. The book has, inevitably, its place in the history of nursing, for it was written by the founder of modern nursing." Contributor Bio:  Nightingale, Florence Florence Nightingale was born in 1820. As a young woman, she felt God was calling her to do good work, and in 1851 she went to Germany for three months of nursing training that led to her becoming superintendent of a hospital for gentlewomen in London in 1853. That year, the Crimean War began, and newspapers described the desperate lack of proper medical facilities for wounded British soldiers at the front. The War Ministry asked Nightingale to oversee a team of nurses in the military hospitals, and in November 1854, she arrived in Turkey. With her nurses, she greatly improved the conditions and substantially reduced the mortality rate. When she returned to England, she established the Nightingale Training School for Nurses in London. Her trained nurses were sent to hospitals all over Britain, where they introduced new ideas and established nursing training on the Nightingale model. Nightingale's theories, published in "Notes on Nursing" (1860), were hugely influential, and her concerns for sanitation, military health, and hospital planning established practices still in existence today. She died in 1910.