Notes On Nursing: What It Is And What It Is Not

Florence Nightingale initially released her book Notes on Nursing: What it Is and What it Is Not in 1859. It was a 76-page book with a 3-page addendum that Harrison of Pall Mall published with the intention of providing nursing advice to people who were responsible for other people's health. Florence Nightingale emphasized that the book was intended to aid in the practice of caring for others rather than serve as a full manual for learning how to become a nurse. The Nightingale School of Nursing's then-director Joan Quixley stated in her introduction to the 1974 edition that despite the passage of time since the publication of Notes on Nursing, "The book astounds one with its applicability to contemporary attitudes and nursing skills, whether these are used by the "ordinary woman" at home, in a hospital, or in the community. The social, economic, and professional distinctions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in no way prohibit the young student or learner from developing if he or she is driven to do so, its unchanged fundamentals by way of intelligent thought and practice".