Florence Nightingale is known as a hospital reformer, a social reformer, and the founder of professional nursing; few realize that she worked closely with doctors on these issues. As Nightingale’s first supporters and colleagues, doctors contributed to reducing the high death rates in Crimean War hospitals and learned from the consequential reforms.

Beginning with an overview of Nightingale’s life and continuing with an exploration of her Crimean War work with army doctors, her post-Crimea work with civilian doctors, and her collaborations with the peacetime army and with army doctors in later wars, Lynn McDonald details the involvement of doctors in Nightingale’s legacy. At a time when hospitals’ death rates were universally high (including at top teaching hospitals), Nightingale formed connections with leading public health doctors and produced heavily cited work on safer hospital design. Her later writings cover her relations with early women doctors and the controversy over state regulation of nurses, bacteriology, and germ theory; here, McDonald argues against flawed secondary literature and the myth of Nightingale’s lifelong opposition to germ theory. The final chapter discusses the legendary nurse’s enduring legacy.

Florence Nightingale and the Medical Men provides timely insight into Nightingale’s principles of disease prevention, data visualization, and the impacts of high disease and death rates – issues that persist in the global health crises of the twenty-first century.

Lynn McDonald is a professor of sociology at the University of Guelph, Ontario. She is a former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Canada’s largest women’s organization. As a Member of Parliament (the first “Ms” in the House of Commons), her Non-smokers Health Act made Parliamentary history as a private member’s bill, and made Canada a world leader in the “tobacco wars.” She is the author of The Early Origins of the Social Sciences (1993), and The Women Founders of the Social Sciences (1994) and editor of Women Theorists on Society and Politics (WLU Press, 1998), all of which have significant sections on Florence Nightingale.

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"A very valuable contribution to a number of debates within the fields of both nursing and medical history." Medicine, Conflict, Survival

“Rich and lively, Florence Nightingale and the Medical Men is the first book to comprehensively detail Florence Nightingale’s various collaborations with doctors. Lynn McDonald reflects deeply the intimate relatedness between the rise of medical science and the refinement of what professional nursing can and should be. The book marks a welcome encapsulation of the interdisciplinary evolution of state medicine and public health.” Paul Crawford, University of Nottingham and co-author of Florence Nightingale at Home