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Key to Editing T he material reported here has been carefully transcribed and verified (see the electronic text for a full description of the process). Remaining illegible words and passages are so indicated , with [illeg] or [?] inserted to indicate our best reading of the word or words in question. Dates for material cited or reproduced are given wherever possible, in square brackets if they are estimates only (by an archivist, previous scholar or the editor). Any controversy about date is indicated in a footnote. The type of material, whether a note, actual letter, draft or copy is given as precisely as possible. Designations of letter/draft/copy signify that the source was Nightingale’s own files, given to the British Library or St Thomas’ Hospital, and are probably drafts or copies she kept. The designation ‘‘letter ’’ is used only when there is good reason to think that the document was actually sent and received (a postmarked envelope, for example, or an archive source other than Nightingale’s own files). In some cases both the original letter and Nightingale’s draft or copy still exist, and these show that her drafts/copies are reliable. We do not use the convention als (autograph letter signed), but ‘‘letter’’ is close to it, bearing in mind that Nightingale often used initials rather than her signature. The electronic Itext gives full information on supporting material (envelopes, postmarks), whether in pen, pencil, handwritten, dictated or typed. All sources indicated as ‘‘Add Mss’’ (Additional Manuscripts) are in the British Library, the largest source of Nightingale material. The Wellcome Trust History of Medicine Library (formerly the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine), both its Western Manuscripts Department and the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre, is abbreviated ‘‘Wellcome.’’ Most of those materials are copies of correspondence at Claydon House, indicated as (Claydon copy). To avoid use of ‘‘ibid.’’ and ‘‘op. cit.,’’ and to reduce the number of footnotes generally, citations are given at the end of a sequence, if the / 91 same source is cited more than once. Subsequent citations are noted in the text with the new page or folio number given in parentheses. The term ‘‘folio’’ (abbreviated as f1, or ff1-2 in the plural) is used for reference to manuscript pages; p and pp indicate printed pages where needed; page numbers after the date or volume number appear without p or pp. To make the text as accessible as possible spelling, punctuation and capitalization have been modernized and standardized, and most abbreviations replaced with full words. Roman numerals are replaced with Arabic (except when indicating royalty, popes and classical texts). We have left Nightingale’s use of masculine generics as they are, hence ‘‘man,’’ ‘‘men,’’ ‘‘he,’’ etc., referring to human beings generally . Some, but not all, excessive ‘‘and,’’ ‘‘but’’ and ‘‘the’’ have been excised. Any words the editor has added to make sense (usually in the case of rough notes or faint writing) appear in square brackets. Nightingale was not consistent in the use of capitals or lower case for synonyms or pronoun references to God and Jesus; we have chosen to standardize her most frequent usage—(He and Him, Thy and Thine, for God; also Creator, King, Son of God, Saviour), but to leave references to Jesus as they are in her texts, sometimes lower case and sometimes upper case. Editorial comments have been standardized to upper case for God the Father, lower case for Jesus. We follow Nightingale in considering that God would be too polite to write Me or Mine for Himself, although in a few places she did so. Italics are used to indicate underlining, small capitals for double (or more) underlining, bold for particularly heavy emphasis. This is changed somewhat to handle the complexities of Nightingale’s biblical annotations later in this volume (see the introduction there). All indications of emphasis and any use of [sic] in texts are Nightingale’s (or that of her correspondent or source), never the editor’s. Quotations from the King James Bible are given exactly as they appear (except that periods are added), so that there will be discrepancies in spelling, punctuation, capitalization, etc. between these and other references to or paraphrases of verses. When taking excerpts from written material, Nightingale indicated ellipses with x x and we have kept these. Ellipses for editorial purposes are indicated with . . . for skipped material within a sentence, or . . . . if to the end of the sentence or more than a sentence has been dropped. Passages that break off...

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