SOURCE: "Florence Nightingale and Simone Weil: Two Women Mystics," in The Twentieth Century, Vol. 164, No, 978, August, 1958, pp. 101-12.

In the following essay, Rees compares the philosophical thought of Nightingale—as expressed in her Suggestions for Thought—and that of Simone Weil.

The pages which follow are extracts from a study of Florence Nightingale's philosophical work, Suggestions for Thought (1860). Readers of the admirable biographies by Sir Edward Cook and Mrs Woodham-Smith already know that Florence Nightingale was a woman of wide culture and learning and that she had a strong, though usually repressed, philosophical and religious bent. It was inevitable, of course, that her titanic administrative and organizing activities after the Crimean War should leave her no time or energy for working at her philosophical treatise, which she used to refer to as 'the stuff and which, when she could bring herself to look through it, she declared to...