Nursing History and Humanities – serie

This book compares the histories of psychiatric and voluntary hospital nurses’ health from the rise of the professional nurse in 1880 to the advent of the National Health Service in 1948. In the process it reveals the ways national ideas about the organisation of nursing impacted on the lives of ordinary nurses. It explains why the management of nurses’ health changed over time and between places, and sets these changes within a wider context of social, political and economic history. Today, high rates of sickness absence in the nursing profession attract increasing criticism. Nurses took more days off sick in 2011 than private sector employees and most other groups of public sector workers. This book argues that the roots of today’s problems are embedded in the ways nurses were managed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It offers insights not only into the history of women’s work but also the history of disease and the ways changing scientific knowledge shaped the management of nurses’ health.

This book examines the work that nurses of many differing nations undertook during the Crimean War, the Boer War, the Spanish Civil War, both World Wars and the Korean War. It makes an excellent and timely contribution to the growing discipline of nursing wartime work. In its exploration of multiple nursing roles during the wars, it considers the responsiveness of nursing work, as crisis scenarios gave rise to improvisation and the – sometimes quite dramatic – breaking of practice boundaries. The originality of the text lies not only in the breadth of wartime practices considered, but also the international scope of both the contributors and the nurses they consider. It will therefore appeal to academics and students in the history of nursing and war, nursing work and the history of medicine and war from across the globe.

This book examines the work that nurses of many differing nations undertook during the Crimean War, the Boer War, the Spanish Civil War, both World Wars and the Korean War. It makes an excellent and timely contribution to the growing discipline of nursing wartime work. In its exploration of multiple nursing roles during the wars, it considers the responsiveness of nursing work, as crisis scenarios gave rise to improvisation and the – sometimes quite dramatic – breaking of practice boundaries. The originality of the text lies not only in the breadth of wartime practices considered, but also the international scope of both the contributors and the nurses they consider. It will therefore appeal to academics and students in the history of nursing and war, nursing work and the history of medicine and war from across the globe.

This book seeks to integrate the history of mental health nursing with the wider history of institutional and community care. It develops new research questions by drawing together a concern with exploring the class, gender, skills and working conditions of practitioners with an assessment of the care regimes staff helped create and patients’ experiences of them. Contributors from a range of disciplines use a variety of source material to examine both continuity and change in the history of care over two centuries. The book benefits from a foreword by Mick Carpenter and will appeal to researchers and students interested in all aspects of the history of nursing and the history of care. The book is also designed to be accessible to practitioners and the general reader.This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, Good health and well-being.

How did skilled nursing practice develop to become an essential part of the modern health system? This book provides some important answers to this question. It traces the history and development of nursing practice in Europe and North America, exploring two broad categories of nursing work: the ‘hands-on’ clinical work of nurses in hospitals and the work of nurses in public health, which involved health screening, health education and public health crisis management. The book contains rich case studies of nursing practice across diverse settings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As well as examining ‘what nurses did’, it explores the significance and meaning of nursing work, for nurses themselves, their patients and their communities, and examines developments in practice against a backdrop of social, cultural, political and economic drivers and constraints.This book will be of interest to academics and clinical nurses alike. It is also an ideal textbook for undergraduate nursing programmes, providing students with rich accounts of the history of their own disciplinary practice.

From the height of colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century, through to the aftermath of the Second World War, nurses have been at the heart of colonial projects. They were ideally placed to insinuate the ‘improving’ culture of their employers into the local communities they served, and travelled in droves to far-flung parts of the globe to serve their country. Issues of gender, class and race permeate this book, as the complex relationships between nurses, their medical colleagues, governments and the populations they nursed are examined in detail, using case studies which draw on exciting new sources. Many of the chapters are based on first-hand accounts of nurses and reveal that not all were motivated by patriotic vigour or altruism, but went out in search of adventure. The book will be an essential read for colonial historians, as well as historians of gender and ethnicity.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Negotiating Nursing explores how the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (Q.A.s) salvaged their soldier-patients within the sensitive gender negotiations of what should and could constitute nursing work and where that work could occur. The book argues that the Q.A.s, an entirely female force during the Second World War, were essential to recovering men from the battlefield and for the war, despite concerns about women’s presence on the frontline. Using personal testimony the book maps the developments in nurses’ work as they created a legitimate space for themselves in war zones and established their position as the expert at the bedside. Yet, despite the acknowledgement of nurses’ vital role in the medical service, their position was gendered. As the women of Britain were returned to the home post-war, it was the military nurses’ womanhood that stymied their considerable skills from being transferred to the new welfare state.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Ellen La Motte: nurse, writer, activist, is a biography of La Motte that traces the arc of her life, from her birth in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1873 to her death in Washington, D.C. in 1961. It integrates original unexamined sources such as diaries, unpublished manuscripts, and publishing contracts along with primary sources—letters, newspaper articles, health department reports, and public records—with an examination of her prolific published writings, about topics as diverse as tuberculosis nursing, women’s suffrage, nursing during the Great War, and the opium trade. It considers of how she developed as a nurse, writer, and activist once she entered the Johns Hopkins Training School for Nurses in 1898 and grew into a potent force in the anti-tuberculosis campaign. Gaining experience speaking and writing on behalf of controversial causes, La Motte put her talents to use on behalf of the fight for the vote for women, nursing during World War I and the anti-opium campaign.

Informed by the memories of African nurses, this book highlights the experiences of men and women who provided nursing services in Zimbabwe’s hospitals in the twentieth–century. It argues that in their subordinate positions, and within their various capacities – nursing assistants, nursing orderlies, medics and qualified nurses - African women and men played a pivotal role in the provision of healthcare services to their fellow Africans. They transformed hospital spaces into their own, reshaped and reformulated indigenous as well as western nursing and biomedical practices. Through their work, African nurses contributed to the development of the nation by being at the bedside, healing the sick and nursing the infirm.

Beyond Nightingale is the first book to explore the inception of modern nursing from a transnational perspective, studying the development of the new military nursing in the five Crimean War armies. The story is told within the broader context of the different political, social and economic cultures from which modern nursing arose. Although the Russians were battling industrialised armies with their pre-industrial, agrarian economy it was they who developed the most innovative system of nursing. The book illustrates the barriers, some of which still exist today, which nurses had to overcome to gain recognition of the crucial role they played in the war. The significant contributions allied and Russian nurses made working directly under fire during the Russians’ brilliant defence of Sevastopol make a wonderfully exciting story during which these mid-nineteenth century nurses proved their extraordinary competencies.

Beyond Nightingale is the first book to explore the inception of modern nursing from a transnational perspective, studying the development of the new military nursing in the five Crimean War armies. The story is told within the broader context of the different political, social and economic cultures from which modern nursing arose. Although the Russians were battling industrialised armies with their pre-industrial, agrarian economy it was they who developed the most innovative system of nursing. The book illustrates the barriers, some of which still exist today, which nurses had to overcome to gain recognition of the crucial role they played in the war. The significant contributions allied and Russian nurses made working directly under fire during the Russians’ brilliant defence of Sevastopol make a wonderfully exciting story during which these mid-nineteenth century nurses proved their extraordinary competencies.

This book follows the lives of female Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution and became nurses. Nursing was nominally a profession but with its poor pay and harsh discipline, it was unpopular with British women. In the years preceding the Second World War, hospitals in Britain suffered chronic nurse staffing crises. As the country faced inevitable war, the Government and the profession’s elite courted refugees as an antidote to the shortages, but many hospitals refused to employ Continental Jews.The book explores the changes in the refugees’ status and lives from the war years to the foundation of the National Health Service and to the latter decades of the twentieth century. It places the refugees at the forefront of manoeuvres in nursing practice, education and research at a time of social upheaval and alterations in the position of women.

This book studies the negative stereotypes around the women who worked as sick nurses in this period and contrasts them with the lived experience of both domestic and institutional nursing staff. Furthermore, it integrates nursing by men into the broader history of care as a constant if little-recognised presence. It finds that women and men undertook caring work to the best of their ability, and often performed well, despite multiple threats to nurse reputations on the grounds of gender norms and social status. Chapters consider nursing in the home, in general hospitals, in specialist institutions like the Royal Chelsea Hospital and asylums, plus during wartime, illuminated by multiple accounts of individual nurses. In these settings, it employs the sociological concept of ‘dirty work’ to contextualise the challenges to nurses and nursing identities.

This book follows the lives of female Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution and became nurses. Nursing was nominally a profession but with its poor pay and harsh discipline, it was unpopular with British women. In the years preceding the Second World War, hospitals in Britain suffered chronic nurse staffing crises. As the country faced inevitable war, the Government and the profession’s elite courted refugees as an antidote to the shortages, but many hospitals refused to employ Continental Jews.The book explores the changes in the refugees’ status and lives from the war years to the foundation of the National Health Service and to the latter decades of the twentieth century. It places the refugees at the forefront of manoeuvres in nursing practice, education and research at a time of social upheaval and alterations in the position of women.

The First World War was the first ‘total war’. Its industrial weaponry damaged millions of men and drove whole armies underground into dangerously unhealthy trenches. Many were killed. Many more suffered terrible, life-threatening injuries: wound infections such as gas gangrene and tetanus, exposure to extremes of temperature, emotional trauma and systemic disease. In an effort to alleviate this suffering, tens of thousands of women volunteered to serve as nurses. Of these, some were experienced professionals, while others had undergone only minimal training. But regardless of their preparation, they would all gain a unique understanding of the conditions of industrial warfare. Until recently their contributions, both to the saving of lives and to our understanding of warfare, have remained largely hidden from view. By combining biographical research with textual analysis, Nurse writers of the great war opens a window onto their insights into the nature of nursing and the impact of warfare.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.