by Lynn McDonald, co-founder | June 23, 2022
The Marylebone Festival, 17-22 July in London
Among the services and concerts for this week of festivities in central London, note July 22, 10:30 am: Walking Tour: Florence Nightingale Pioneer and Innovator meet at Fortnum & Mason, Piccadilly; then at 1.10 pm: St Marylebone Parish Church, The Two Nightingales, The Curious Story of Florence Nightingale; Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind, with Amanda Pitt (soprano), Gavin Roberts (piano), and Sarah Gabriel (actor). Jenny Lind, a great singer, also gave concerts to raise money for the Nightingale Fund, towards the founding of her school.
Visit the Florence Nightingale Museum to see her Crimean War carriage
Thanks to John Shallcross for forwarding a picture of the (captured) Russian carriage commandeered by chef Alexis Soyer, so that Nightingale could (easily) visit the war hospitals in the Crimea in 1855. Soyer then had the carriage sent back to London.
My last book on Nightingale!
When the 16 volumes of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale were all out, in 2012, that was to be the end. Four short books came out subsequently to make her material more accessible. Now, in 2022, the last one has just been published, Florence Nightingale and the Medical Men: Working Together for Health Care Reform, McGill-Queen’s University Press. This is full circle, for McGill-Queen’s published my Early Origins of the Social Sciences, 1993, which has a section on Nightingale, as a social scientist, my first publication on her.
Florence Nightingale and the Medical Men also includes some material on women doctors (they don’t appear until Chapter 6). It was men doctors, however, who helped her get nursing started as a profession and worked with her on getting out the data on the Crimean War deaths, and how they were brought down. It was men doctors, also, who worked with her for years after on hospital safety and the broader public health reforms.
The book also has material—different from anything published before—on the state registration of nurses. Altogether, it reports on issues of interest, but not covered elsewhere.
Let your library know about it!
The Nightingale Society: North America
Nurses and Nightingale supporters in the United States and Canada are invited to join this group, for occasional email updates and zoom meetings. Next meeting June 28 by Zoom 3 p.m. (EDT). Reply to contact@nightingalesociety.com.