There is no one better qualified to write a reference guide to the life and works of Florence Nightingale than Lynn McDonald. A professor emerita at the University of Guelph—and a former Canadian MP who, in 1988, drafted pioneering legislation to establish smoke-free workplaces—McDonald has been working on Nightingale since the early 1990s. Her monumental achievement from that research is the sixteen-volume Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press between 2001 and 2012. The result of twenty years of meticulous labor in archives around the world, spent tracking down, transcribing, cataloguing, and interpreting Nightingale's writings, the Collected Works is and will remain an indispensable resource for anyone conducting substantial research into Nightingale's life and ideas.

McDonald has never attempted a full-scale biography of Nightingale, producing instead several short introductory volumes: Florence Nightingale at First Hand (2010), Florence Nightingale: A Very Brief History (2017), and Florence Nightingale, Nursing and Health Care Today (2018). These are now joined by Florence Nightingale: A Reference Guide to Her Life and Works, part of publisher Rowman & Littlefield's Significant Figures in World History series. Nightingale is the first woman to feature in the series, which commenced with J. David Archibald's Charles Darwin: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works (2019), and includes Leonardo da Vinci, Robert E. Lee, John F. Kennedy, and Napoleon.

McDonald has followed Rowman & Littlefield's standard format, which is to include a detailed chronology of the figure's life; an A–Z of relevant events, places, and people; and an extensive bibliography. McDonald's preface, six-page chronology, and eight-page introduction are concerned to show the range of Nightingale's interests and achievements. Alongside her well-known adventures in the Crimean War and the creation of the Nightingale Training School for Nurses, they cover such issues as her strong Christian faith, her research methods and publications, and her work on India.

The A–Z section—essentially an encyclopedia of the historical actors, events, and places that were relevant to Nightingale, explaining how they pertain to her life and work—makes up the bulk of the volume. The entries are generally brief on aspects of the subjects covered that do not relate to Nightingale, such that they may be best read in conjunction with a conventional encyclopedia or biographical dictionary. The choice of topics for entries is careful, logical, and thorough, as would be expected from McDonald's earlier work. To browse the book is to be struck by the extent of Nightingale's interests and the number of significant people—from Giuseppi Garibaldi to John Stuart Mill, William Rathbone to Queen Victoria—with whom she worked or came into contact. The length of the entries corresponds fairly closely to their importance to Nightingale: the two longest entries are on India (on which Nightingale worked for decades, albeit with limited results) and the Crimean War. The nursing entry is unexpectedly short. Perhaps surprisingly given its importance to Nightingale's recent reputation, there is no entry for “Statistics,” though individual statisticians with whom Nightingale worked, notably William Farr and Alphonse Quetelet, are covered, and Nightingale's use of tables and charts is discussed in other entries. Nor does Mary Seacole get an entry—an omission that, though arguably justified in terms of Seacole's marginal relationship to Nightingale's life and work, seems strange in view of the way their reputations subsequently became intertwined (a topic on which McDonald has indeed written an entire book, The Myth of Mary Seacole [2014]).

For researchers, one of the most valuable aspects of the book will be the (albeit unsystematic) cross-referencing that McDonald provides to the Collected Works, archival sources, and secondary reading. In effect, this reference guide may thus serve as a companion volume to the Collected Works, providing indications of where to follow up on specific research areas. The bibliography provides a chronological list of Nightingale's publications and their location in the Collected Works—another valuable contribution, as the Collected Works volumes are structured thematically rather than chronologically. The rest of the bibliography is patchy: McDonald itemizes various primary sources on the Crimean War, including some in French, but then provides only a few works relating to other aspects of Nightingale's life and work. While she lists the major biographies, it is a shame that space was not found to detail the other academic literature on Nightingale. A brief list of important academic works would surely been of use to more readers than, for example, the exhaustive list that McDonald provides of every archive in the world in which an original Nightingale letter may be found.

Such quibbles aside, Florence Nightingale: A Reference Guide to Her Life and Works will serve as a valuable study aid to serious students of Nightingale's life, work, and ideas, and a further testament to Nightingale's significance as a key figure of nineteenth century Britain.