This article looks closely at the women who worked as ward staff at Guy's Hospital between the hospital's founding and the year of Florence Nightingale's birth. It continues the task of reassessing the lives and contributions of women who nursed in the years before the onset of the nursing-reform movement. This article does not rest on extensive data: It cannot say with any confidence, for example, the proportion of women who worked as nurses that were spinsters rather than wives or widows. What it can do is to set out some indicative examples that belie our existing assumptions. The results assist on dismantling the stereotype of the prereform nurse and replace it with an appreciation of these women as health care participants. This article argues that the women were very rarely incompetent or drunkards and in contrast were frequently equal to the tasks set for them by hospital governors, with or without being literate. They were also people with family connections to the wider metropolitan population and even to people with whom they forged friendships during their employment. In other words, they were rounded individuals whose working lives were governed by their position as relatively impoverished female Londoners rather than by their lack of ability or motivation.
Nursing practice at Haslar Naval Hospital was regulated by the British Royal Navy's Sick and Hurt Board. Before 1795, when the position of hospital governor was created, on-the-ground authority was in the hands of medical practitioners through the collective governance of the Physician and Council. This paper examines how Haslar Naval Hospital's Physician and Council navigated the instructions of the Sick and Hurt Board and whether they strictly followed these regulations when they disciplined nurses. Areas for discussion include the complexity of authority in nursing practice during everyday ward-based medical care. Why did the Physician and Council choose to discipline some nurses and not others despite the strictness of the regulations? Rather than the drunken, ineffective stereotype normally associated with eighteenth-century nurses, the minutes of the Physician and Council show a much more complicated story of authority and nursing discipline.
This article aims to explain an early twentieth-century staffing method known as group nursing and its relationship to nurse shortages. In the 1920s hospital wards in the United States were generally staffed with student nurses. Hospitalized patients who wanted more personalized care or needed more care because of serious illness often hired a self-employed, private-duty registered nurse for one-on-one care. Under group nursing, a hospital dedicated certain clusters of private rooms where two or three patients were cared for by one registered nurse. Group nurses were employed, paid, and supervised by the hospital, and hospitals charged patients extra to offset the cost. High-quality personalized care increased nurse satisfaction and decreased nurse shortages. Many hospitals experimented with group nursing in the 1920s, but when they transitioned to registered nurse service in the 1930s, the hospitals' options for having a fully qualified staff were group nursing and general duty nursing. Under general duty nursing, registered nurses replaced some students on the wards. General duty nursing was easier for a hospital to implement and eventually became the stan-dard for hospital staffing. Nevertheless, group nursing mitigated nursing shortages, promoted nurse satisfaction, and decreased the need for outside nursing staff.
This article explores the experiences of the first Chinese graduate nurses in British Columbia, Canada, between 1929 and 1960. Drawing on newspaper articles (both mainstream and Chinese), professional nursing publications, available interviews and correspondence, we argue that racism posed a significant obstacle for the first generation of Chinese women who wished to enter nursing schools in the province. Chinese nurses were the first to racially integrate into the white Canadian nursing profession, but they were initially admitted into nursing schools so that they could support and maintain segregated health care in British Columbia. Despite the racism that Chinese nurses faced, they carved out successful professional nursing careers that extended far beyond Chinese communities in the province.
Queering nursing's history is imperative. In a political landscape that demands compliance with legislation that infringes on the rights and well-being of people, understanding moments of queer resistance in health care and in nursing allows nurses to think about how to respond to looming threats. This article considers the ways in which cisheteronormativity was enforced in nursing in the second part of the twentieth century, beginning with health care as a site for the production of queer pathology moving into considerations of how sexuality was weaponized in higher nursing education and beyond. It then considers two organizations that imagined something different: the Gay Nurses Alliance, formed in Philadelphia in 1973, and CASSANDRA Radical Feminist Nurses Network, a lesbian separatist collective formed in 1982 in Washington, DC, Both organized in response to perceived failures of nursing's premier professional organization to substantively engage ideas of gay liberation and feminist action. In spite of their ongoing invisibility, queer nurses have always been part of nursing. Mending this tear enriches nursing, restoring narratives and stories that reflect people who might dream of becoming nurses who otherwise may not see themselves in the discipline.
Georgetown University School of Nursing began in 1903 as a hospital diploma program. Previous school histories have not interrogated how racism existed within and around registered-nursing education. Nor did they fully celebrate the students and faculty who were trailblazers in bringing diversity to the school and university. This article addresses that scholarly gap. It is intentionally attentive to Black students, faculty, and staff at Georgetown University, given the institution's history of enslavement and racial segregation. Furthermore, this article seeks to recover the names of individuals in Georgetown nursing education and practice who represent diverse cultural, ethnic, racial, and religious identities, particularly the women who have not been acknowledged in written histories. This article includes the time period from Georgetown's participation in enslavement to the civil rights era.
Although nursing had not been a popular choice as a profession for Jewish women in Germany during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its importance as a mode of occupation increased significantly under the Nazi regime. While other professional people were forced to relinquish their status and training, qualified nurses were entitled to wear nursing pins and uniform and Jewish hospitals were allowed to continue to train nurses. Nursing as work therefore offered a number of material advantages. Its identity as a respected and respectable profession for women gave its members a sense of worth and purpose during a time of great horror. The work itself offered a chance for Jewish women to maintain a sense of their humanity and provided them some security in a regime that wanted all Jews dead. Using the written and oral testimonies from a range of Jewish women who worked as nurses under the Nazi regime, this article considers the importance of being a nurse and nursing work as methods of survival. It acknowledges the requirements to subvert the expectation of compassion and self-sacrifice that were necessary for those who were members of a privileged minority in the ghettos and camps.
This article draws from the investigated histories, undertaken by the authors, of Aboriginal Queensland women who trained as nurses and midwives from the 1890s to the 1950s. Specifically, the life of one Queensland Aboriginal woman midwife is highlighted. In spotlighting this story, the authors make known new knowledge that would otherwise be rendered invisible and thus provide a corrective to the Australian nursing historical record. The authors frame the article with an understanding of the Queensland historical context for both the treatment of Aboriginal peoples and the formation of the nursing profession. Situated with this knowledge, the authors present a dialogue that outlines the critical value of centering Aboriginal approaches in research. Working in unison, the authors' combined techniques unravel the story of the socially entrenched low White expectations that stated that Aboriginal women lacked agency, only operated in passivity, and could not be educated or self-determining. The authors counter these prevailing historical White attitudes with the story of Muriel Stanley. Born on an Aboriginal mission in Queensland during the historical time that is generally known as the Segregation and Protectionist Era, Stanley, as an Aboriginal midwife, enacted a different attitude than that ascribed to her.
