BIBLIOTHECA: BOOK ROOM FOR NURSES

Florence Nightingale- She dared to be different

Florence Nightingale is synonyms to nursing

So whats better than her, to start a blog for nursing.Nurses all over the world knows, who +Florence Nightingale is. But still we know very less about her. Like we may not be knowing about her family, we may not be knowing that she knew more than three languages, or she wrote her autobiography, or she invented pie chart etc.

“Florence Nightingale-She dared to be different”
A book by Ms +Pushpa Biswas. It is a 160 page book divided into 23 chapters, including conclusion. Initial chapters deals in details about her family, childhood and education. All the chapters are written under the subtitle e.g. Florence Nightingale-The Saint, Florence Nightingale-The Statistician.Different chapters describes different aspect of her life. Most of her life events we all know. So,I am going to focus only on the parts which are new in this book.

Chapter Three: Florence Nightingale-The Statistician, says, that she is a pioneer in the visual presentation of information. She was the one who invented pie chart and named it “coxcomb”. She also developed a model hospital statistical form for hospitals to collect and generate consistent data and statistics.

Florence Nightingale- The Writer, covers the details of her almost all the published and some of the unpublished writing.She has not only written about the nursing related topics but also written about various social and environmental issues like thrift, women suffrage, birds etc. The chapter also gives a broad outline of her book “Notes on Nursing” in which she mentioned about needs of ventilation and warming, health of house, petty management, noise, food and its maintenance, personal and environmental hygiene, need of rest and comfort. Not many of us know that she has written her autobiography in french ” La Vie de Florence Rossignel”.

his book includes three beautiful poems by the writer Ms P. Biswas. “The Ministering Angle”-on Florence nightingale, ” I dare to be me”-on women,

” Who else but a nurse”- on nurses.
It also has a poem written by H.D.Rawnsly “To the lady with the lamp”
and a thanks giving poem by British soldiers.

Florence Nightingale had written so many articles based on condition of British army soldiers working in India and she advocated the change of condition for them, though she never visited India in person. Like she directed the purification of Madras water system from her bed in South Street London.The book also contains an article written by Gandhiji about Florence Nightingale, which was published in Indian Opinion on Sep 9th 1915.

The most interesting chapter is chapter 14- “Did you know?” It covers various facts from the life of Ms Nightingale, which most of us are not aware of, like as written before, she never visited India, and still worked to reform the condition of British army soldiers, she had a beautiful singing voice and had a passion for opera.

Even chapter 16 – “We now know, what was not known then”, deals with the theories and ideas advocated and implemented by Ms Florence Nightingale. Like, typhus is spread by body lice, good nutrition is specially important to sick etc.

Chapter 17 reminds me of my exams when we used to get questions like, What should be the qualities of good nurse and our answer starts from alphabet A to Z? This chapter is best to prepare for that answer because all the necessary qualities, a nurse must have, ( A to Z, literally) are written down by Ms Pushpa Biswas following the guidelines of Ms Nightingale. In this chapter you will also get the Nurses day theme from year 1988 to year 2008 and the priceless quotations of Ms Florence Nightingale.

I know students would not like to buy it because it does not cover the entire course, but I will suggest all the nursing faculty and colleges to must have this book because ( as book quotes) “The past informs the future”. For nurse to continue their voyage they should know what we had then, what we have now and what we will have in future. The past is here in the form of “Florence Nightingale-She dared to be different”. The book also contains so many quotes by Florence nightingale, for Florence nightingale and related to the topic.