'Concerning our national honour': Florence Nightingale and the welfare of aboriginal Australians.

Florence Nightingale was a prolific writer on many subjects from nursing to religion to hospital design and sanitary statistics. Her writing on the indigenous people of Australia is little known but should be of interest especially to those involved in the present desperate search for ways to improve the health of Australia's first settlers. Nightingale's evidence was second-hand, derived largely from missionaries, especially Bishop Salvado of the Benedictine foundation of New Norcia in Western Australia. This paper reviews the attitudes to Australian Aborigines which emerge from Nightingale's and others' writings and argues that their place in modern nursing is to stimulate a reappraisal of current attitudes to Aboriginal health.