Florence Nightingale on Public Health Care: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale

Front Cover
Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, Jan 20, 2004 - Biography & Autobiography - 701 pages

This sixth volume in the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale reports Nightingale’s considerable accomplishments in the development of a public health care system based on health promotion and disease prevention. It follows directly from her understanding of social science and broader social reform activities, which were related in Society and Politics (Volume 5). Public Health Care includes a critical edition of Notes on Nursing for the Labouring Classes, papers on mortality in aboriginal schools and hospitals, and on rural health. It reports much unknown material on Nightingale’s signal contribution of bringing professional nursing into the dreaded workhouse infirmaries. This collection presents letters and notes on a wide range of issues from specific diseases to germ theory, and relates some of her own extensive work as a nurse practitioner, which included organizing referrals to doctors and providing related care.

Currently, Volumes 1 to 11 are available in e-book version by subscription or from university and college libraries through the following vendors: Canadian Electronic Library, Ebrary, MyiLibrary, and Netlibrary.

 

Contents

Introduction to Volume 6
1
Key to Editing
13
Notes on Nursing for the Labouring Classes
17
Colonial Sanitary Statistics and Aboriginal Depopulation
163
SickNursing and HealthNursing
203
The Reform of Workhouse Infirmaries
221
Public Health Issues Rural Health and Nightingales Caseload
507
Appendix
673
Bibliography
679
Index
686
Copyright

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Common terms and phrases

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Page 32 - The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health or of nursing — for they are in reality the same — obtain among the well as among the sick.
Page 57 - ... walls, not upon the airier court ; or they opened the room doors into the unaired halls and passages, by way of airing the rooms. Now all this is not fancy, but fact. In that handsome house I have known in one summer three cases of hospital pyaemia, one of phlebitis, two of consumptive cough : all the immediate products of foul air. When, in temperate climates, a house is more unhealthy in summer than in winter, it is a certain sign of something wrong.
Page 44 - ... better understand in towns shutting the windows during the day than during the night, for the sake of the sick. The absence of smoke, the quiet, all tend to making night the best time for airing the patients. One of our highest medical authorities on Consumption and Climate has told me that the air in London is never so good as after ten o'clock at night.
Page 31 - It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet — all at the least expense of vital power to the patient.

About the author (2004)

Editor Lynn McDonald is a professor of sociology at the University of Guelph, Ontario, a former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Canadas largest womens organization, and a former Member of Parliament. She herself has been a public health advocate. As a Member of the Canadian Parliament, she succeeded in getting the Non-smokers Health Act adopted in 1988 as a private members bill. It not only made Parliamentary history (aside from the fact that McDonald was the first Ms in the House of Commons) but it also made Canada a leader in the tobacco wars. She is the author of several books on women theorists.