Introduction

Abstract

The idealistic, thirty-one-year-old Florence Nightingale whom Elizabeth Gaskell describes in her letter of October of 1854 (see preface) had not yet been put through the fire of directing hospital nursing in Scutari. She had yet to learn the ins and outs of attempting to produce reforms from within enormous government bureaucracies, and she could not have known how much influence her own story would have on the societies in which she lived and the people in whose lives she took an interest.