Victorian Medicine and Social Reform Florence Nightingale among the Novelists [Hardcover]

Victorian Medicine and Social Reform traces Florence Nightingale s career as a reformer and Crimean war heroine. Her fame as a social activist and her writings including Notes on Nursing and Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army influenced novelists such as Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot. Their novels of social realism, in turn, influenced Nightingale's later essays on poverty and Indian famine. This study draws original conclusions on the relationship between Nightingale s work and its historical context, gender politics, and such twenty-first-century analogues as celebrity activists Angelina Jolie, Al Gore, and Nicole Kidman.Introduction Defending Home and Country: Florence Nightingale's Training of Domestic Detectives On Giving: Poor Law Reform, 'Work,' and 'Family' in Nightingale, Dickens, and Stretton Competing Visions: Nightingale, Eliot, and Victorian Health Reform Engaging the Victorian Reading Public: Nightingale and the Madras Famine of 1876 Epilogue

Victorian Medicine and Social Reform: Florence Nightingale Among the Novelistsmakes an important contribution to the study of this famous figure, not only by outlining the literary influences on Nightingale's life and letters, but by emphasizing the shifts in her rhetorical techniques according to her underlying goals for social health and reform. - Social History of Medicine Victorian Medicine and Social Reform: Florence Nightingale among the Novelists is an original addition to the Nightingale scholarship which sees beyond stereotypical representations of the famous Crimean War heroine. Through looking closely at Nightingale s writings, Penner offers a portrait of the reformist and makes explicit how she addressed health and social problems by recurrently adapting her rhetoric to her reading public. - Miranda

Penner s new book makes an intriguingly backward historicist move: instead of placing Victol1