Notes on Nursing: what it is, and what it is not.

First edition, second issue, this copy with an autograph letter signed from the author tipped in at the rear to Gaetano Meo, dated January 1887. Meo (18501925) was a painter, mosaic artist, and an artist's model associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Meo left his home in southern Italy at the age of 14, taking only his harp as a means of earning. He made it to Clerkenwell, known at the time as Little Italy, and was introduced to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Simeon Solomon, who would both use Meo repeatedly as a model. In the present letter Nightingale expresses her relief that "your son Rocco is sufficiently recovered to be moved from Brighton" and discusses her arrangements for his transfer to Queen Square Hospital in London, and sends on his ticket of admission for Friday 7 January.

The first issue does not have the notice "The right of translation is reserved" at the base of the title page and has plain yellow endpapers. This copy has the advertisement endpapers, dated 1864. Originally published six months before the opening of the Nightingale School at St Thomas's Hospital in London in June 1860, this work was not intended to be a textbook per se but as a book of hints for those nursing in the hospital ward and in the domestic sick room. Nightingale provides practical descriptions of the nurse's duties in supplying her patient's needs, and "indicated a new and more responsible role for nurses, one that required proper training and medical knowledge" (Hook & Norman, p. 260).