Florence Nightingale and The Viceroys

By Patricia Mowbray

The depth and commitment Florence Nightingale applied to all the campaigns of her life, from her early zeal in encouraging reform of the Poor Laws, through her many and famous achievements in nursing during the Crimean War and her promotion of the establishment and development of the nursing profession and organizing it into its modern form, was to continue in later years with her pursuit of health reform in India.
Nightingale clung to her ambitions in the face of bitter opposition from her family and peers. They viewed her missionary vocation with horror from their positions of prestige and privilege.
After her return from the Crimean War, she was the most famous woman in Victorian England, other than Queen Victoria herself, and was able to use the influence that both her popularity and social status brought to her to continue to have her work taken seriously. Her comprehensive statistical study of sanitation in Indian rural life made her the leading figure in the improved medical and public health service in India.
Her means of effecting these changes lay in the direct and often challenging relationships she maintained with a series of Viceroys from Lord Canning in 1858 to Lord Elgin in 1898.
This book tells the story of the trials of her last great humanitarian campaign.

Patricia Mowbray has studied Art History and spent much of her life in historical research at St Thomas’ Hospital in London.
Her involvement with the Florence Nightingale Museum and the 150th Anniversary Lectures on the arrival of Florence Nightingale at the Barrack Hospital in Scutari in 1854, has led to her biography on this unsung aspect of  Florence Nightingale’s later campaign.  

2010 marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Florence Nightingale.

An exhibition will run from September at the V&A in London in her honour.