Florence Nightingale at Home

Winner of the 2021/2022 People's Book Prize Best Achievement Award Homes can be both comforting and troubling places. This timely book proposes a newunderstanding of Florence Nightingale's experiences of domestic life and how ideasof home influenced her writings and pioneering work. From her childhood homes inDerbyshire 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, bringinghome comforts to the soldiers in the Crimean War and advising the British populationon the home front how to create healthier, contagion-free homes. Later, she createdNightingale Homes for nursing trainees and acted as mother-in-chief to her extendedfamily of nurses. These efforts, inspired by her Christian faith and training in human carefrom religious houses, led to major changes in professional nursing and public health, asNightingale strove for homely, compassionate care in Britain and around the world. Shedid 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 anastonishing cultural afterlife.