Studying the professional career of the English heroine Florence Nightingale is mandatory in just about every accredited school of nursing because, after all, she gave respectability to her profession. Even Nightingale's mother would faint at the thought of her daughter being a "nurse", because respectable ladies in Victorian England just didn't do such things. Thankfully, Florence broke with her culture and created, what some would call, a new paradigm for women. Now, that's the way Florence Nightingale is presented to nursing students, but it's not the way author Hugh Small presents his argument in "Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel". Well, of course, somebody had to break the myth of Florence Nightingale. As an icon of Victorian culture and style, Nightingale had to be taken down a peg or two. Never mind, the memorial to Nightingale located in the middle of a group of stuffy old coffins in the crypts in London's St. Paul's Cathedral. Never mind, the enormous statue honoring Nightingale and the memorial to the Crimea, nearly causing traffic jams at the intersection where it is boldly located in downtown London. Never mind, the Nightingale Museum and its life sized display of three demensional shadow boxes located adjacent to St. Thomas Hospital in London. If the real Nightingale would please stand up, as Hugh Small describes her in his biography, the lady's myth would be on trail right now for genocide, having caused the deaths of thousands of British soilders in the 1856 Crimean War. The biographer Small, of course, anticipated just such a visceral reaction from Nightingale's cult, mostly nurses like myself, so he floods the book with lengthy documentation and footnotes to counter any dispute about the authenticity of his Nightingale research. In summary, if history addicts want to know about remote letters from people as memorable as Lord Palmerston and details of the NcNeill-Tulloch reports to Parliment about the Nightingale hospital, then, this book is definitely made to order. Of course, it's admirable to have a couter-cultural history published every 100 years or so about our sacred myths and legends. Hugh Small certainly deliveres a counter-cultural point of view, so for this I give him a nod of approval. Nevertheless, I didn't like reading "Avenging Angel", bcause the biographjy, I believe, belies the premise if its cover. Small sets the reader up for one expectation about the heroine Nightingale while actually undermining the reader's trust with absolutely mind startling information. So, I guess somebody had to eventually re-invent Nightingale. Too bad, the story is 150 years after the fact. Perhaps the best part of reading "Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel" is the reinforcement it provides to holistic healers and health care skeptics who instinctively seem to know that staying away from hospitals is better for your health and life longevity than relying on the curative treatment that may never come. Rating this book was difficult, but for historical data it gets a 5; for story value it gets a 1...."Data 5, Book 1"....so, I think a rating of 2 is fair.

Hugh Small's account of Florence Nightingales contribution in the Crimean war has made rivoting reading. His willingness to answer some of the hitherto unasked questions using thorough and reliable research is to be commended. He challenges many of the romantic notions of Florence Nigfhtingale whilst preserving her reputation as a remarkable woman with great political influence.