Florence Nightingale at First Hand by Lynn McDonald (review)

If Charles Darwin has a Rottweiler in the well-known evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, then Florence Nightingale has her equivalent in Lynn McDonald, the Canadian social scientist, politician, and editor of The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (2001–12), a collection of sixteen weighty volumes. McDonald has almost single-handedly countered perceived and actual slights on Nightingale’s record, reputation, and person that have surfaced recently. This has included withering criticisms of the Australian historian, Francis Barrymore Smith; the British Broadcasting Corporation; British academic nurses; and those who wish to raise a statue to Mary Seacole, the Jamaican doctress who practised in the Crimean War, at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. Much of McDonald’s criticism is entirely justified and is the background to and partly explains the reason for the publication of this volume, the centenary of Nightingale’s death in 2010 being another.

In Florence Nightingale at First Hand, McDonald sets out to avoid the pitfalls of both the hagiographical accounts of the early twentieth century and the cynical and downright malicious attacks of latter years. Thus the reader is presented with an overview of the life and work of an important nineteenth-century reformer and icon, who is remembered in the popular imagination as the lady with the lamp and whose sole achievement is thought to be the founding of modern nursing. McDonald, in contrast, emphasizes Nightingale’s breadth of interest in religious, social, and political issues, as well as her achievements in a range of social reforms, principally that of the army, nursing, workhouses, and hospitals. Following preliminary material and a chapter that provides biographical background, the book is divided into six chapters which give details of Nightingale’s work and concludes with a short chapter concerned with her legacy. For many readers, her interest in and commitment to India will come as a surprise. Of great significance is McDonald’s response to ideas that Nightingale was fixed in her opposition to germ theory; she shows Nightingale’s conversion to the concept by the late nineteenth century, which contradicts previous views concerning Nightingale’s stance toward health and infection. We know more about Nightingale’s spirituality and religious thoughts and influences as a result of this work. However, controversial issues partly addressed within the Collected Works, such as the effectiveness of the training school at St. Thomas’ Hospital in its early years are glossed over. For instance, McDonald cites Lincoln as one of the “major examples” of the success of sending out matrons to provincial hospitals, but in reality the first nurses sent in 1866 were a disaster; it was only in 1879 that a competent matron took over the nursing of the Lincoln County Hospital (113). In addition, McDonald is less than forthcoming about the problems of sending matrons and nurses overseas. As Judith Godden has demonstrated in Lucy Osburn, A Lady Displaced (2006), her excellent biography of Lucy Osburn, the lady superintendent sent to the Sydney Hospital, Nightingale’s opinion of her protégés was neither always positive nor her stance always supportive.

There is no doubting that McDonald is an expert, if not the world’s leading contemporary authority, on the work of this remarkable person. She claims to have read all the surviving material which stretches into more than ten thousand letters as well as published material in the form of official reports, books, articles, pamphlets, and so on, deposited in over two hundred archives worldwide. The book aims to present Nightingale to the reader in her own words by the use of quotations within the text and the reproduction of primary sources in the form of letters and extracts from other work. To a certain extent this method works, but the choice of extracts is not fully justified and some are quite long and not necessarily integrated with the accompanying text. The quotations within the text are frequently not referenced or only refer to a volume of The Collected Works and...