Dr Anna Greenwood and Dr Richard Bates, of the Department of History, have co-written a book on Florence Nightingale with other academics as part of the interdisciplinary research project, Florence Nighingale Comes Home for 2020.
The book, titled 'Florence Nightingale at Home' is due to be published by Palgrove MacMillan on 6 November and is available for pre-order now. It is co-authored by Paul Crawford, Professor of Health Humanities in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham, and Dr Jonathan Memel, lecturer in English Literature at Bishop Grosseteste University, alongside Dr Greenwood and Dr Bates.
About the research project
The AHRC-funded research project, Florence Nightingale Comes Home for 2020, aims to produce a more complex historical and literary understanding of Florence Nightingale by mapping her family and home connections to Derbyshire, and analysing how her regional experiences impacted her career, attitudes, and writings.
A joint venture between the School of Health Sciences and the Department of History, the project also investigates what Nightingale's life and work reveals about the health history and cultural life of the Victorian Midlands. It is timed to coincide with national celebrations of Nightingale's bicentenary in 2020.
More on Florence Nightingale Comes Home for 2020
About the book
Homes can be both comforting and troubling places. This timely book proposes a new understanding of Florence Nightingale’s experiences of domestic life and how ideas of home influenced her writings and pioneering work. From her childhood homes in Derbyshire and Hampshire, she visited the poor sick in their cottages. As a young woman, feeling imprisoned at home, she broke free to become a woman of action, bringing home comforts to the soldiers in the Crimean War and advising the British population on the home front how to create healthier, contagion-free homes. Later, she created Nightingale Homes for nursing trainees and acted as mother-in-chief to her extended family of nurses. These efforts, inspired by her Christian faith and training in human care from religious houses, led to major changes in professional nursing and public health, as Nightingale strove for homely, compassionate care in Britain and around the world. She did most of this work from her bed after contracting the debilitating illness, brucellosis, in the Crimea, turning her various private homes into offices and ‘households of faith’. In the year of the bicentenary of her birth, she remains as relevant as ever, achieving an astonishing cultural afterlife.
Pre-order your copy of Florence Nightingale at Home
Posted on Thursday 29th October 2020