Florence Nightingale and Hospital Reform

by Lynn McDonald

Overview

Florence Nightingale began working on hospital reform even before she founded her famous school of nursing; hospitals were dangerous places for nurses as well as patients, and they urgently needed fundamental reform. She continued to work on safer hospital design, location, and materials to the end of her working life, advising on plans for children’s, general, military, and convalescent hospitals and workhouse infirmaries.

Florence Nightingale and Hospital Reform, the final volume in the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, includes her influential Notes on Hospitals, with its much-quoted musing on the need of a Hippocratic oath for hospitals—namely, that first they should do the sick no harm. Nightingale’s anonymous articles on hospital design are printed here also, as are later encyclopedia entries on hospitals.

Correspondence with architects, engineers, doctors, philanthropists, local notables, and politicians is included. The results of these letters, some with detailed critiques of hospital plans, can be seen initially in the great British examples of the new “pavilion” design—at St. Thomas’, London (a civil hospital), at the Herbert Hospital (military), and later at many hospitals throughout the UK and internationally. Nightingale’s insistence on keeping good statistics to track rates of mortality and hospital stays, and on using them to compare hospitals, can be seen as good advice for today, given the new versions of “hospital-acquired infections” she combatted.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780889204713
Publisher:	Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publication date:	03/13/2007
Series:	Collected Works of Florence Nightingale Series , #16
Pages:	992
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 2.40(d)

About the Author

Lynn McDonald, director of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, is university professor emerita at the University of Guelph. She is an environmentalist, a former member of parliament, a former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, and a long-time activist on womens issues. She has an honorary doctorate from York University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Dramatis Personae ix

List of Illustrations x

Florence Nightingale: A Précis of Her Life xi

An Introduction to Volume 16 1

The Need for Hospital Reform 9

The Pavilion Principle 13

Nurses' Working and Living Conditions 18

Germ Theory, Contagion and Infection 23

Chronology of Nightingale's Work on Hospital Reform 34

Key to Editing 37

Notes on Hospitals

Notes on Hospitals, 1st and 2nd editions 1858 and 1859 43

[Sixteen Sanitary Defects in the Construction of Hospital Wards] 60

Note on the Hospital Plans 72

Notes on Hospitals, 3rd edition 1863 79

1 Sanitary Condition of Hospitals 83

Note A. On the Mortality of Hospital Nurses 97

Note B. On the History of the Doctrine of Contagion 99

Note C 100

2 Defects in Existing Hospital Plans and Construction 101

Note. On the Proportion of Attendants to Sick in Different Classes of Hospitals 122

3 Principles of Hospital Construction 124

4 Improved Hospital Plans 148

5 Convalescent Hospitals 164

6 Children's Hospitals 171

7 Indian Military Hospitals 178

8 Hospitals for Soldiers' Wives and Children 195

9 Hospital Statistics 196

B Proposal for Improved Statistics of Surgical Operations 210

Nomenclature of Operations 215

Appendix on Different Systems of Hospital Nursing 218

Distribution, Reviews and Response to Notes on Hospitals 224

Military Hospitals: Letters, Notes, Articles and Reports

Military Hospitals: Letters, Notes, Articles and Reports 233

Nightingale's Articles on Netley 265

A Contribution to the Sanitary History of the British Army 333

Gordon Boys' Home, 1885-90 475

Civil Hospitals: Letters and Notes

Civil Hospitals: Letters and Notes 497

List of Civil Hospitals on which Nightingale Advised 499

The Lisbon Children's Hospital, 1859-60 524

Glasgow Royal Infirmary, 1859-61 532

"Hospital Statistics and Hospital Plans" 560

"Winchester Infirmary," Hampshire County Hospital, 1858-64 585

Midlands Hospitals, 1860-67 621

Buckinghamshire Infirmary, Aylesbury, 1859-69 638

Malta Civil Hospitals, 1862-65 661

Swansea General Hospital, 1864-65 673

Derby Infirmary, 1864-69 705

Workhouse Infirmaries, 1865-68 721

Sydney Infirmary (Prince Alfred Hospital), 1866-69 and 1874 736

Convalescent and Cottage Hospitals, 1857-74 754

St. Thomas' Hospital, 1859-74 775

Wellow School, 1872-74 798

Children's Hospitals, 1874-76 803

Montreal General Hospital, 1874-76 809

Typhoid Epidemic in Bangor, 1882 835

St Marylebone Workhouse Infirmary Nurses' Home Addition, 1882-83 840

Children's Hospitals, 1879-81 851

Convalescent and Cottage Hospitals, 1877-89 864

Liverpool Royal Infirmary, 1882-85 873

Women's Hospital, Euston Road, 1888 884

Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal, 1888-89 891

"Hospitals" in Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 1889-90 908

Derbyshire Royal Infirmary, 1891-94 918

Metropolitan Fever Hospitals, 1893-95 927

Miscellaneous Last Work on Hospital Reform, from 1890 933

Appendix

Appendix A Biographical Sketches 949

Bibliography 954

Index 962

Editorial Reviews

‘‘The Nightingale project ranks with both the Gladstone diaries and the Disraeli letters as a major undertaking in the field of Victorian-era scholarship, and therefore is of surpassing value to historians of the period, as well as to general readers.''

C. Brad Faught

‘‘This is not only an excellent volume but also a crowning edition for the sixteen-volume series. The volume on hospitals brings together many of Nightingale's interests and clearly demonstrates her enormous impact on all aspects of hospital management.... The editor is to be congratulated on what can only be described as a magisterial piece of scholarship.''

Christine Hallett

‘‘[I]t is clear that this is an academic project of the highest importance and integrity. It will have an impact on the work of scholars far beyond the immediate field of health history. Nightingale's interests were wide-ranging and her correspondence included some of the leading thinkers of her day....The editing of these volumes is exemplary. Every reference has been followed up, including the identification of minor dramatis personae. Important personalities are accorded short biographies. On every page there are biblical allusions, which are faithfully identified. Each thematic section has an introductory essay and these are amplified by a full outline of Nightingale's life and thought in volume 1. This project makes a major contribution to scholarship which will be of permanent value.''

Helen Mathers

‘‘The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale is an extremely ambitious project that is a great service to scholarship. Every general academic library should own the complete set. It pulls together material that has been hitherto diffused across more than 150 collections, some of them private ones, in places ranging from Germany to India and Japan, as well as numerous English-speaking countries.''

Books and Culture, November/December 2008 - Timothy Larsen

‘‘The Collected Works will allow us to see for the first time the full complexity of this extraordinary and multifacted woman. It will be a tool of enormous value not only to Nightgale scholars and biographers, but also to historians of a wide variety of aspects of Victorian society: war, the army, public health nursing, religion, India, women's issues and so on.''

Times Literary Supplement, January 10, 2003 - Mark Bostridge