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Lot 254

NIGHTINGALE (FLORENCE)

22 November 2011, 10:30 GMT
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £2,375 inc. premium

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NIGHTINGALE (FLORENCE)

Autograph letter signed (“Florence Nightingale”), to the Rev Charles Stubbs (later Bishop of Truro), the letter headed “Cottage Hospitals”, giving details of a number of these hospitals and then launching into a disquisition on the qualities and training required of a district nurse: “The characteristics of these Nurses, I should say, is: (1) that they nurse the squalid one-roomed homes as well the Patients, out them into good order & cleanliness, & teach the inmates to keep them clean & in good order. They thus exercise a considerable educational influence (2) & that they are not alms givers, for, if District Nurses are allowed to give alms, they soon become nothing else but alms-givers/ but they know from what parochial & other authorities, clergy, charities & societies to obtain all the needs of the poor sick at home/ they thus exercise one of the functions of a Charity Organization Society/ also (3) that, besides teaching cleanliness & healthfulness, they know to what Sanitary Authorities to appeal to do what people cannot do for themselves./ they thus possess the means of doing good to the poor Patients & their families... 4. You do not mention a trained Midwife, the need of which we have been in the habit of considering to be sometimes greater than that of an ordinary Nurse”; together with the first bifolium (without signature) of an earlier autograph letter to the same correspondent, also headed “Cottage Hospitals” (“...From the very many years of my being an prisoner to my rooms, I have no personal knowledge of the working of any cottage Hospital. They meet a legitimate want in circumstances, such as you suggest...”); together with a contemporary photograph of the invalid Miss Nightingale making light work of a pile of letters resting on her lap, 12 pages, on headed paper, light time-staining, 8vo, South Street, 26 February and 7 March 1887

Footnotes

'THAT THEY NURSE THE SQUALID ONE-ROOMED HOMES AS WELL THE PATIENTS': Florence Nightingale on the essential qualities required of a district nurse and their training at "the Central District Home at Bloomsbury Square", model for the present-day Queen's Nursing Institute. Although, as a valetudinarian, she was unable to practise district nursing herself, she held the threads of the movement, founded by the Liverpool MP William Rathbone in her hands, and he consulted her on every point, declaring 'In any matter of nursing Miss Nightingale is my Pope and I believe in her infallibility' (E.T. Coke, The Life of Florence Nightingale, 1913, ii, p. 357).

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