Florence Nightingale's Suggestions for Thought

Lynn McDonald, director of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, is university professor emerita at the University of Guelph. She is an environmentalist, a former member of parliament, a former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, and a long-time activist on womens issues. She has an honorary doctorate from York University.

``Justly famous as the founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale's fame has endured from the 1950s until today. The two books under review here provide ample evidence as to why this should be so. As both author and editor Lynn McDonald has spent much of her professional career probing virtually every aspect of Nightingale's ninety years of life. And what an amazingly productive life it was, which Nightingale's sixteen-volume Collected Works--edited principally by McDonald--makes clear. But if the received public image of Nightingale continues to be that of the "Lady of the Lamp," then both her own Suggestions for Thought and McDonald's short biography--published to mark the centenary of Nightingale's death--show her to have been a hard-headed, clear-thinking reformer, in addition to a heroic nurse.... The Nightingale project ranks with both the Gladstone diaries and the Disraeli letters as a major undertaking in the field of Victorian-era scholarship, and therefore is of surpassing value to historians of the period, as well as to general readers.'' -- C. Brad Faught, Tyndale University College, Toronto -- Anglican and Episcopal History, Vol. 81 (1), March 2012, 201204