National Nurses Week

Damien Ihrig, MA, MLIS
Curator, John Martin Rare Book Room

The past year has been an incredibly difficult one, particularly for frontline healthcare workers. I come from a family of nurses, and I have seen firsthand the toll this has taken. May 6-12 is National Nurses Week and I would like to use this as an opportunity to celebrate nurses everywhere for their amazing dedication and sacrifices during this very trying time.

Although she practiced in the mid to late 19th century, Florence Nightingale is still the most famous name in nursing in the west. 2020 was meant to be a grand celebration of her 200th birthday, but that was put aside as nurses and other health professionals went to work caring for the sick and dying. The pandemic is still with us, but there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel, so we now celebrate her and the efforts of all nurses in 2021.

Practices have evolved substantially since she cared for soldiers during the Crimean War and helped create the modern profession, but her impact on nursing is undeniable. Beyond nursing, she was recognized for her work in biostatistics and was a champion for women's rights, patient's rights, and sanitary living and working conditions. This month, we highlight her most famous work, Notes on Nursing: What it is, and What it is Not. Written for the layperson taking care of someone at home, it nonetheless provided a foundation for nursing curricula at the time in the west. Beyond this work, we have others (including an edition of Notes... in Swedish!) that may interest you and will have them set out for the month for anyone wishing to stop by and take a look. The usual Covid protocols apply, so contact me to arrange a time to visit, either in person or over Zoom.

So, to my grandmother Louise, auntie Cindy, auntie Laurie, cousin Jennifer, cousin LaDonna, sister-in-law Char, and to nurses everywhere, thank you!

And to everyone, stay well and happy reading!

May 12 at 7:00 PM (central) – Iowa Bibliophiles
Keats Among the Private Press Printers
Zoom link

Join Associate Professor from Illinois State University and co-founder of the Keats Letter Project, Brian Rejack, as he talks about the private press movement in England at the end of the nineteenth century, examining what it tells us about the Victorian reception of John Keats.

While no claims can be made toward quantitative over-representation of Keats’s works in the productions of private presses like the Kelmscott Press, Doves Press, and Vale Press, Keats’s poetry is certainly reprinted in many gorgeous editions from such presses. Rejack will examine these works, showing that the aesthetic and ideological aims of private press printers align quite well with Keats’s own materialist notions of beauty and that private press editions of Keats help to emphasize this element of his poetics through their particular bibliographic strategies.

Rejack will focus on books from the end of the Victorian period, but will also gesture towards some examples of more recent innovative editions of Keats’s works that continue to carry elements of the fine printing movement forward into the present.

Book of the Month

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE (1820-1910). Notes on nursing: what it is, and what it is not. Printed by Harrison in 1860. This is the second issue of the first edition. 79 pages. 21.6 cm tall.

Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, to a wealthy, aristocratic British family. She was known for her smarts and humor, translating classic works and excelling at math and statistics. She was keen on helping others and saw nursing, a fairly disreputable career at the time, as her opportunity to do so. She was trained in France, Germany, and Egypt, and after nursing experience in England, in 1854 she was asked to take charge of a group of nurses being dispatched to the Crimea to care for the British wounded in the war. Her heroic efforts brought the mortality rate among the soldiers from 42 percent to 2 percent.

The rest of her life was spent in the struggle to improve the care of patients and to establish nursing as a profession. This no-nonsense book is not only a call for the establishment of training of nurses; it offers practical advice on the care of patients. Nursing, she says in Notes..., "has been limited to signify little more than the administration of medicines and the application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet."

Although this book is undated and its publication is often ascribed to 1859, it was probably not actually available to the public until 1860. The present issue is sometimes called the first issue, but as a few copies exist in which no advertisements appear on the endpapers and in which a statement concerning translation rights (carried in later issues on the title page) does not appear, this must be accorded place as the second issue, before correction of several typographical errors in the text.

The book itself is unassuming, created during a time of transition from high quality to lower quality papers. Of the two 1860 books we have, one is in good shape. The brown, stamped cloth covers remain mostly intact and the paper, although yellowed slightly, is in excellent condition. The second book has seen a lot of wear and tear and will eventually need conservation work to reattach the covers and a few pages. There are no illustrations, but there are some fun advertisements for other Harrison printed books used as endpapers. In addition, one of the books has a small engraving of Lea Hurst, Nightingale's home, that someone pasted in the front at some point in the life of the book.

We have other works by NIghtingale and many others on the topic of nursing. If you are interested in seeing these or other items mentioned in this or earlier newsletters, please contact Damien Ihrig at damien-ihrig@uiowa.edu to arrange a visit in person or over Zoom.