Florence Nightingale: Letters from the Crimea, 1854-1856

Although Florence Nightingale lived for ninety years, the crucial period that defined her life was the twenty months she spent at the British Army hospitals in Scutari and Balaclava during the Crimean War. These months were the crucible in which she attained national attention and which crystalized her self-definition as a reformer, first of the Army Medical Service, then as a reformer of the Indian Affairs, British hospitals and, most important for nurse historians, of the methods of preparing and using nurses in hospitals. 

Sue Goldie notes that through her lifetime Nightingale wrote about 13,000 letters, of which 300 were written when she was in the Crimea. Goldie has selected 100 of her Crimean letters for this volume. The letters are presented chronologically from her 4 November 1854 note to her family from on board the Vectis as it sailed into the harbor at Constantinople, through her letter of 23 July 1856 to the Bermondsey nuns of London, written in the days before she left Scutari.