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

the origin of modern nursing

First edition, second issue, with advertisements on the endpapers dated 1860 and 'the right of translation is reserved' on the title. An attractive copy.

'Defining nursing as "helping the patient to live", Nightingale "introduced the modern standards of training and esprit de corps, and early grasped the idea that diseases are not 'separate entities'... but altered conditions, qualitative disturbances of normal physiological processes, through which the patient is passing. While she did not know the bacterial theory of infectious diseases, she realized that absolute cleanliness, fresh air, pure water, light, and efficient drainage are the surest means of preventing them"' (Garrison, History of Medicine, p. 773, quoted in Norman Library of Science and Medicine 1600).

On her return from the Crimean War a public subscription was raised to found a school of nursing. Notes on Nursing was published six months before the school opened and was intended, 'not as a textbook, but as a book of hints for those nursing in the hospital ward and in the domestic sick room. The principles of hygiene and sanitation which Nightingale had applied with such success in the military hospital at Scutari, in the Crimea, were fundamental... Notes on Nursing described in great practical detail the nurse's duties in supplying her patient's needs, and it indicated a new and more responsible role for nurses, one that required proper training and medical knowledge. Notes on Nursing was the first major work on it subject and remained influential for many years' (Grolier, One Hundred Book Famous in Medicine 71).

First edition, second issue; 8vo; chart within the text, small tape repair on the verso of the title, short closed tear in the margin of D4; original limp brown pebble-grain cloth, title to upper board gilt, yellow endpapers printed with publisher's ads, spine rebacked to style, cloth lightly rubbed with tiny worn spots at the corners, very good condition; 79pp.

Bishop & Goldie, Florence Nightingale: A Bio-Bibliography, pp. 15-18; Grolier, One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine 71; Hook & Norman, The Norman Library of Science and Medicine 1600-1602.