---

Victorian Medicine and Social Reform traces Florence Nightingale s career as a reformer and Crimean war heroine. Her fame as a social activist and her writings including Notes on Nursing and Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army influenced novelists such as Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot. Their novels of social realism, in turn, influenced Nightingale´s later essays on poverty and Indian famine. This study draws original conclusions on the relationship between Nightingale s work and its historical context, gender politics, and such twenty-first-century analogues as celebrity activists Angelina Jolie, Al Gore, and Nicole Kidman.

---

Introduction Defending Home and Country: Florence Nightingale´s Training of Domestic Detectives On Giving: Poor Law Reform, ´Work,´ and ´Family´ in Nightingale, Dickens, and Stretton Competing Visions: Nightingale, Eliot, and Victorian Health Reform Engaging the Victorian Reading Public: Nightingale and the Madras Famine of 1876 Epilogue

---

LOUISE PENNER, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA.

---