The Victorian period was the most formative era for professional nursing and for cultural concepts of the nurse. The most prominent representative figures of nursing from the period were the disreputable Sairey Gamp – the infamous character from Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewitt – and the very real and very proper Florence Nightingale. The Victorian cultural perception of nursing was more complex than these polar opposites might suggest, however. The influences that cumulatively fashioned the popular figure of the nurse were legion and contradictory, ranging from camp follower to proselytising nun to heroic martyr.

The evolution of nursing practice from menial to professional work was widely examined and debated in the media and through fictional representations of nurses. As these treatments reveal, there was marked cultural ambiguity about the entrance of refined women into nursing, which, even in its most professional form, entailed a level of intimacy with both male and female bodies and bodily fluids that was disturbing to Victorian sensibilities. What emerges in both the media and fiction is a curious and very Victorian fixation on sexuality that was explicitly or implicitly directed at the women who practised nursing.

The aesthetic power of Persian images and figures - the nightingale, the Simurgh, the chessboard of life - found in the works of Omar Khayyam and the poet-astronomer, Farid al-Din ’Attar, clearly delighted Borges and served to rhetorically embellish his own metaphysical explorations. Engaging with the ’Rubaiyat’ of Omar Khayyam, he perceived a model of translation as an act of mysterious, generative non-linear literary collaboration. ’Attar is the author of the exemplary literary construction of the theme of the seeker being sought. In fictions such as ’El Zahir’ and essays such as ’The Simurgh and the Eagle’, Borges enlists Persian referents to confront and unsettle the centre-periphery dynamics he, and subsequent post-colonial thinking, perceived at play among world literatures.

For Borges, English literature was the richest in the world, and he came across the Romantics as a boy. Neither Wordsworth nor Byron appealed much, but Keats impressed him as the greatest lyrical poet in the English language, and he wrote ’Keats’s Nightingale’ (1952), which is a significant essay. Borges had an ambiguous relationship with Coleridge, and he penned ’Coleridge’s Flower’, using it as an occasion to attack authorial individuality. ’Coleridge’s Dream’ echoes ’Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ in its treatment of the idea that idealist objects can invade our world. Finally, with De Quincey Borges shared the view that everything in the world was a mirror of the universe, or a set of symbols; De Quincey also provided him with a style or grammar of writing.