Florence Nightingale to Her Nurses

Between 1872 and 1900 Miss Nightingale used, when she was able, to send an annual letter or address to the pro¬bationer-nurses of the Nightingale School at St. Thomas' Hospital, "and the nurses who have been trained there." These addresses were usually read aloud by Sir Harry Ver-ney, the chairman of the Nightingale Fund, in the presence of the probationers and nurses, and a printed copy or a lith¬ographed facsimile of the manuscript was given to each of the nurses present, "for private use only." A few also were written for the Nightingale Nurses serving in Edinburgh. The letters were not meant for publication, and indeed are hardly suitable to be printed as a whole as there is nat¬urally a good deal of repetition in them. Since Miss Night¬ingale's death, however, heads of nursing institutions and others have asked for copies of the addresses to be read or given to nurses, and her family hope that the publication of a selection may do something to carry further the intention with which they were originally written.