This seventh volume in the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale consists of letters, observations, and notes from Florence Nightingale's many trips to Europe, beginning with a family journey when she was a teenager. It includes annotations she made on opera libretti from her "music mad" phase and her winter in Rome (1847-48) which were so important in shaping her liberal politics and support for independence movements. Her letters and notes from Greece and central Europe in 1850, and her Kaisers- werth stay in 1851, reveal her developing ideas on social reform, as well as her...

Volume 8: Florence Nightingale on Women, Medicine, Midwifery and Prostitution makes available a great range of Florence Nightingale's work on women: her pioneering study of maternal mortality in childbirth (Introductory Notes on Lying-in Institutions), her opposition to the regulation of prostitution through the Contagious Diseases Acts (attempts to stop the legislation and otherwise to facilitate the voluntary treatment of syphilitic prostitutes), her views on gender roles, marriage and measures for income security for women and excerpts from her draft (abandoned) novel....

Social Change in India shows the shift of focus that occurred during Florence Nightingale's more than forty years of work on public health in India. While the focus in the preceding volume, Health in India, was top-down reform, notably in the Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India, this book documents concrete proposals for self-government, especially at the municipal level, and the encouragement of leading Indian nationals themselves. Famine and related epidemics continue to be issues, demonstrating the need for public works like irrigation and for...