NIGHTINGALE, Florence.

London: Longman,… 1863

Large 8vo, pp. ix, 1 leaf, pp. 187, 11 folding plans of hospitals, 3 folding samples of forms, and 2 large folding plans of London and Paris. Tear in fold of the large plan of Paris neatly repaired. Original dark mauve cloth (spine neatly repaired), brown endpapers, uncut. Paper very slightly browned in the margins, but a very good copy. Inscribed at the top of the title-page “Presented to W.J. Nixon Esq. by the Council of the Nightingale Fund, Decmber 1874” and with the Fund’s blind stamp adjacent (William J. Nixon, House Governor, the London Hospital); signature of E.W. Goodall, Hampstead, Jan. 2 1907.

Third and definitive edition. See G&M 1611, the first separate edition of 1859, consisting of 108 pages, and very similar in appearance to Notes on Nursing. “The little book, revolutionary in character, set the seal on Miss Nightingale’s authority on the subject of hospitals, and gave a new direction to their construction” (Sir James Paget in 1859). For this third edition, Miss Nightingale wrote in the preface that it had been “necessary to rewrite the whole of it, and to make so many additions to the matter that it is in reality a new book.” The new edition caused The Lancet to say of it in 1864 that “no one has studied the great subject with which this important book deals so thoroughly as its authoress.” Bishop & Goldie, Bio-bibliography, 101.

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