Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army. [bound with:] Subsidiary Notes as to the Introduction of Female Nursing into Military Hospitals in Peace and in War

London: Harrison and Sons, 1858. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Near Fine. 1st Edition. Hardcover. 8vo - over 7¾ - 9¾" tall. Two works in one volume. 8vo (222 x 141mm). [4], iv, [9], vi-xix, [2] 2-12, 2, xxx, 66, xlvii [1], iv, 67-80, xxxiv [2], 81-176, [2], 177-234, xliv, 235-332, xxvii [1], 333-556, lviii, 557-567 [1] pp; iv [2] v-x, 28, 133 [1], 23 [1] pp. First work with 6 plates (5 folding, 1 coloured), second work with 1 folding plate. Contemporary red half calf, plain spine titled in gilt, upper board with Lord Houghton's stamp in gilt, powder blue endpapers (extremities slightly rubbed). Several leaves unopened. Text quite crisp and clean, little spotting to a few pages only, folding plate 'Diagram of the Causes of Mortality' a few mm proud of the book block resulting in slight soiling and short closed tearing at fore-edge. Provenance: Richard Monckton Milnes, first baron Houghton (1809-1885, stamp on binding); Robert Offley Ashburton Crewe-Milnes, 1st marquess of Crewe (The Lord Houghton), 1858-1945, British Liberal politician, statesman and writer (engraved armorial bookplate 'Roberti Comitis de Crewe' to front pastedown); by descent to his daughter Mary, duchess of Roxburghe. A fine copy in untouched binding. ----

PMM 343 (first work); Bishop and Goldie, Florence Nightingale, no. 3 (second work) and no. 50 (first work), not in Norman. FIRST EDITIONS AND EXCEPTIONALLY RARE; FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION ONLY, AND RARELY FOUND TOGETHER AS HERE. The rather complex collation of our set conforms with those given in Bishop and Goldie.
These works formed the foundation for all the administrative, sanitary and nursing reforms in the Army, which followed the report by the Royal Commission which Nightingale persuaded Lord Panmure to set up when she met him at Balmoral in October 1856. Panmure officially requested that Nightingale give evidence based on her own experience and observations, and by August 1857 she had the main body of the work ready for the press. However, it was not published at once, as it wasn't considered appropriate to appear before the Report of the Royal Commission itself. When the latter appeared the following January, it contained an appendix with a mass of official correspondence on the care of the sick and wounded during the Crimean War which Nightingale immediately incorporated in her own Notes 'while the proof sheets . . . were passing through the press.' The last-minute incorporation of this material explains the erratic pagination of the work, the additions being on pages with Roman numerals. Nightingale's biographer, Sir Edward Cook, calls this book 'the least known, but . . . the most remarkable of her works. It is little known because it was never published.' The Notes were compiled and printed within nine months of her first meeting with Panmure and at her own expense for private circulation among influential people, and they show her as a major innovator in the collection, tabulation, and interpretation of descriptive statistics; someone who recognized the value of the idea that social phenomena could be objectively measured and subjected to mathematical analysis. "There is not a grievance, nor a defect of the system (or lack of it), not a remedy that is overlooked. An introduction deals with army health in earlier campaigns. The first six chapters are concerned with the ghastly medical history of the Crimean War. This is followed by extensive and detailed recommendations on hospital organization. The rest of the book ranges far and wide over matters of army life, from sanitary requirements to the pay of private soldiers." (PMM).
Subsidiary Notes is developed and expanded from the 'tentative and experimental Memorandum' on Female Nurses in Military Hospitals (1857), and really constitutes a treatise on nursing at large. Her much better known Notes on Nursing, published two years later, was an abridged version of the detailed study which had gone into this earlier, privately printed book. - Visit our website for additional images and information.