NOTES ON NURSING. What it is, and What it is Not.

First revised edition. Association copy, inscribed by Henry Bonham Carter, Florence Nightingale's first cousin and secretary for the Nightingale Fund. Original textured brown cloth with gilt titles to the spine and blindstamped decorative borders to the upper and lower boards. A good, entirely unsophisticated copy, the binding fragile as usual, with wear to the corners and splitting with exposed webbing to the spine, the spine holding. The contents, with Bonham Carter's presentation gift inscription to the half title, toning to the closed text-block edge and some isolated foxing spots to the early pages, are otherwise clean throughout. A nice copy with a fantastic association.

Inscribed in black ink on the half title "Henrietta Cooling / from / Henry Bonham Carter / July 1915". Henry Bonham Carter (1827-1921) was a barrister who was the first cousin, lifelong friend and adviser of Florence Nightingale (1820-1910). He acted as the secretary to the Florence Nightingale Fund and Training School for Nurses between 1861 and 1914 and was involved with the running of various hospitals and nursing-based initiatives such as St. Thomas's Hospital (where Nightingale established her Training School), the Metropolitan Nursing Association and the Queen Victoria Jubilee Institute of Nursing. Nightingale and Bonham Carter maintained a long-standing correspondence in which they advised and supported each other in their endeavours in nursing development. Nightingale bequeathed her papers and letters to him upon her death, which he organised and provided to Sir Edward Cook to aid in the writing of 'The Life of Florence Nightingale', the first Nightingale biography. The Florence Nightingale Fund was safeguarded by the Bonham Carter family for over a hundred years (with Henry Bonham Carter's great granddaughter, the actress Helena Bonham Carter, frequently serving as an appeal ambassador), before merging with the Florence Nightingale Foundation in 2023. An appealing association copy of Nightingale's groundbreaking text on nursing, completed soon after her return from Crimea. The book was intended not as handbook on how to become a nurse, but rather to impart practical knowledge to anybody who may have to care for a person in ill-health. Nevertheless, the book's clear advice on hygiene, ventilation, diet and sickroom management was remarkably timely and effective in a period when germ theory was still a contested concept, and its tenets formed the backbone of early modern nursing education. Much of the guidance is timeless and universal, and it remains a classic text to this day.