Boston University Leads Archival Project of Florence Nightingale’s Letters

The Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University has led an international effort to make the correspondence of Florence Nightingale available online. Nightingale, considered the founder of modern nursing, was instrumental in establishing new standards for hygiene as a military nurse during the Crimean War in the 1850s. She later established the first nursing school in England and authored the first modern textbook on nursing practices.

The Boston University center had 300 letters authored by Nightingale, the largest collection outside the United Kingdom. It joined with the Florence Nightingale Museum and the Wellcome Library in London to establish the digital archive in 2014.

Now seven new partners have joined the consortium adding their Nightingale collections to the online archive. The online collection now includes 2,272 Nightingale letters. Among the new institutions adding documents to the online archive are Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of North Carolina, the National Institutes of Health.

The Florence Nightingale Digitization Project may be accessed here.