Histories of nursing practice

By Manchester University Press

Contains eleven landmark essays that explore the significance and meaning of nursing, with a wide geographic range that expands the existing literature on nursing work

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781784996314

Book preview

Histories of nursing practice

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This series provides an outlet for the publication of rigorous academic texts in the two closely related disciplines of Nursing History and Nursing Humanities, drawing upon both the intellectual rigour of the humanities and the practice-based, real-world emphasis of clinical and professional nursing.

At the intersection of Medical History, Women’s History and Social History, Nursing History remains a thriving and dynamic area of study with its own claims to disciplinary distinction. The broader discipline of Medical Humanities is of rapidly growing significance within academia globally, and this series aims to encourage strong scholarship in the burgeoning area of Nursing Humanities more generally.

Such developments are timely, as the nursing profession expands and generates a stronger disciplinary axis. The Manchester University Press Nursing History and Humanities series provides a forum within which practitioners and humanists may offer new findings and insights. The international scope of the series is broad, embracing all historical periods and including both detailed empirical studies and wider perspectives on the cultures of nursing.

Previous titles in this series:

Mental health nursing: The working lives of paid carers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Edited by Anne Borsay and Pamela Dale

One hundred years of wartime nursing practices, 1854–1954

Edited by Jane Brooks and Christine E. Hallett

‘Curing queers’: Mental nurses and their patients, 1935–74

Tommy Dickinson

Who cared for the carers? A history of the occupational health of nurses, 1880–1948

Debbie Palmer

Histories of nursing practice

Edited by Gerard M. Fealy, Christine E. Hallett, and Susanne Malchau Dietz

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2015

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 9954 0 hardback

First published 2015

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

Contents

List of contributors

Preface

Susanne Malchau Dietz

Introduction: Histories of nursing practice

Christine E. Hallett and Gerard M. Fealy

Part I Care and cure in nursing work

1 Baby and infant healthcare in Dresden, 1897–1930

Bettina Blessing

2 The taste of war: The meaning of food to New Zealand and Australian nurses far from home in World War I, 1915–18

Pamela J. Wood and Sara Knight

3 ‘In the company of those similarly afflicted’: The sanatorium patient and sanatorium nursing, c. 1908–52

Martin S. McNamara and Gerard M. Fealy

4 ‘Hurting and caring’: Nursing burned children in the Chicago School fire disaster, 1958

Barbara Brodie

5 A poverty of leadership: Nursing older people in British hospitals, 1945–80

Jane Brooks

6 Beyond the cuckoo’s nest: Nurses and ECT in Dutch psychiatry, 1940–2010

Geertje Boschma

Part II Public health and nursing work

7 The cholera epidemic of 1892 and its impact on modernising public health and nursing in Hamburg

Mathilde Hackmann

8 ‘Some kindred form of medical social work’: Defining the boundaries of social work, health visiting and public health nursing in Europe, 1918–25

Jaime Lapeyre

9 ‘Community healthcare’: Struggles and conflicts of an emerging public health system in the United States, 1915–45

Rima D. Apple

10 Nurses in schools, coal towns and migrant camps: Bringing healthcare to rural America, 1900–50

John Kirchgessner, Arlene W. Keeling and Mary E. Gibson

Index

Contributors

Rima D. Apple, PhD, is Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA and Professor Extraordinarius at the University of South Africa. She has published extensively in women’s history, the history of medicine and nursing, and the history of nutrition. Among her eight books are Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America (Rutgers University Press, 2006) and Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture (Rutgers University Press, 1996), which received the Kremers Award 1998 from the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy. In 2011 she received the M. Adelaide Nutting Award for Exemplary Historical Research and Writing, from the American Association for the History of Nursing. She has lectured extensively both in the United States and internationally. She is the recipient of grants and awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Library of Medicine, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Wellcome Trust.

Bettina Blessing is a Lecturer at the Institute of History, University of Potsdam, Germany. She studied history and ethnology in Regensburg in Germany where she completed her master’s degree in 1994 and in 2001 she was awarded a PhD from the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. Between 2009 and 2013 she was Research Associate at the Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation, in charge of the history of nursing. Her main areas of research are: social history of medicine, the history of nursing and the history of pharmacy; she has published a monograph history of homoeopathic therapies, entitled Pathways of Homoeopathic Medicine (Springer, 2011).

Geertje Boschma is Professor at the School of Nursing, University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada. She is faculty lead of the Consortium for Nursing History Inquiry at the UBC School of Nursing, leading a research programme on the history of nursing and healthcare, with special emphasis on mental health and mental health nursing, including historical analyses of the development of mental health services in British Columbia and studies of the development of community mental health services. She has published extensively on aspects of nursing history including articles on the history of mental health nursing in Canada and professional identity. She is a former recipient of the M. Adelaide Nutting Award of the American Association of the History of Nursing for exemplary historical writing and research.

Barbara Brodie is Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia School of Nursing. She has been involved in nursing history since 1982 when she initiated courses in nursing history in the University of Virginia’s new PhD nursing degree programme. Her particular scholarly focus is on the development of paediatric nursing services in both hospital and ambulatory settings during the twentieth century. She has numerous historical publications and presentations and has been very active in the American Association for the History of Nursing. Currently she is the Associate Director of the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry at the University of Virginia.

Jane Brooks is a Lecturer in Nursing at the University of Manchester School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, Deputy Director of the UK Centre for the History of Nursing and Editor of the Bulletin of the UK Association for the History of Nursing. She is a nursing historian with a particular interest in military nursing during World War II, nursing older people, and the early movements for the university education of nurses in Britain. She is co-editor (with Christine Hallett) of One Hundred Years of Wartime Nursing Practices, 1854–1953 (Manchester University Press, 2015). She is the current recipient of the Royal College of Nursing of the United Kingdom History of Nursing Society Monica Baly Bursary.

Gerard M. Fealy is Professor of Nursing and Associate Dean for Research, Innovation and Impact at the University College Dublin School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health Systems. A nursing historian, he has published several monographs, including A History of Apprenticeship Nurse Training in Ireland (Routledge, 2006) and The Adelaide Hospital School of Nursing, 1859–2009 (Columba Press, 2009) and (with M. McNamara and S. Lucey) Equal Citizens: Sunbeam House, 1874–2014 (Sunbeam House Trust, 2014). He is a founding member of the European Association for the History of Nursing and has served on the Board of the American Association for the History of Nursing. He is a researcher and writer on disciplinary development in nursing and has led several national commissioned studies on professional policy in nursing in Ireland. He is also a researcher in social gerontology and is the Director of the National Centre for the Protection of Older People at University College Dublin.

Mary E. Gibson is Associate Professor and Assistant Chair of the Department of Family, Community and Mental Health Systems at the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Nursing and is Assistant Director of the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry. She joined the faculty at UVA School of Nursing in 1997 and her teaching focuses on community health and obstetrics. She was awarded her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 2007; her doctoral dissertation examined the care and treatment of disabled children in Virginia in the period 1910–35. Dr Gibson’s research focus is early twentieth-century child health and public health and she has published several scholarly articles on aspects of nursing and healthcare history. She has served on the Board of the American Association for the History of Nursing, as Chapter and Virginia Section Chair of Association of Women’s Health Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses and is the immediate past President of the Beta Kappa Chapter of Sigma Theta Tau.

Mathilde Hackmann is a member of the academic staff at Hamburger Fern-Hochschule, Germany, where she is mainly responsible for developing teaching materials for health and nursing students in distance learning programmes. She is an active member of the Historical Nursing Research Section of the German Association for Nursing Science since 1996 and her research interest in nursing history is focused on community nursing. She qualified as a nurse in 1980 in Thuine (Germany) and gained her first academic degree (Diplom-Pflegepädagogin FH) in Germany; and she graduated with an MSc in Nursing and Education from the University of Edinburgh in 1998. Her professional background includes various positions in basic and further education for nurses and as an adviser for community nursing.

Christine E. Hallett is Professor of Nursing History at the University of Manchester School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work and visiting Professor at the University of Tromsø. She is the Director of the UK Centre for the History of Nursing and Midwifery, the Chair of the UK Association for the History of Nursing and was the Founding Chair of the European Association for the History of Nursing. Professor Hallett has published extensively in the field of military nursing history, including the monographs: Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War (Manchester University Press, 2009); First World War Nursing: New Perspectives (with Alison Fell) (Routledge, 2013); and Veiled Warriors: Allied Nurses of the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2014). She is a co-editor for the academic book series Nursing History and Humanities at Manchester University Press. Professor Hallett holds fellowships of both the Royal Society of Medicine and the Royal Society for the Arts.

Arlene W. Keeling, PhD, RN, FAAN, is the Centennial Distinguished Professor of Nursing at the University of Virginia School of Nursing. She is also Chair, Department of Acute and Specialty Care, and Director of the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry. Dr Keeling is author of numerous articles on nursing history and an award-winning book, Nursing and the Privilege of Prescription, 1893–2000 (Ohio State University Press, 2006). She has co-authored/edited several other books, including: Rooted in the Mountains; Reaching to the World: A History of the Frontier School of Nursing, 1939–1989 (Butler Books, 2012) which received the AJN Book of the Year Award for Public Interest and Creative Works, 2012; Nurses on the Front Line: A History of Disaster Nursing 1879 to 2005 (Springer Publishing, 2010); and Nursing Rural America: Perspectives from the Early Twentieth Century (Springer Publishing, 2015). A past President of the American Association for the History of Nursing, Dr Keeling currently serves as co-chair of the Expert Panel on Nursing History and Health Policy, the American Academy of Nursing.

John Kirchgessner is Assistant Professor at Wegmans School of Nursing, St John Fisher College, Rochester, New York. His research and scholarship focus on the history of American healthcare and nursing and his specialty areas are paediatrics and chronic illness. He holds a master of science in nursing and a paediatric nurse practitioner certificate and was awarded his PhD in Nursing from the University of Virginia (UVA) in 2006. He is co-editor (with Arlene W. Keeling) of Nursing Rural America: Perspectives from the Early Twentieth Century (Springer, 2015). Dr Kirchgessner continues to serve as Assistant Director of the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry at UVA. He received the University of Virginia Certificate of Appreciation in Recognition of Outstanding Contributions to Nursing Education.

Sara Knight is an archivist at Archives New Zealand in Wellington and is an independent historical researcher and writer. She was awarded a PhD in history by the University of Wales in 2005; her thesis examined hospital nursing in Cardiff, Wales, during the First World War. As a Research Assistant at Swansea University, she was part of a team that developed the South Wales Coalfield Collection, now archived at Swansea University. This resulted in a co-edited (with Anne Borsay) book, entitled Medical Records for the South Wales Coalfield, 1890–1948: An Annotated Guide to the South Wales Coalfield Collection (University of Wales Press, 2007). She is also co-author (with Pamela J. Wood) of Achieving University Education for Registered Nurses: The Role of the C. L. Bailey Nursing Education Trust, Graduate School of Nursing (Victoria University of Wellington, 2010).

Jaime Lapeyre is a Lecturer at the Lawrence S. Bloomberg School of Nursing, University of Toronto. She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto on the history of public health nursing education and internationalism in nursing and the struggle for control over nursing education more broadly during the post-World War I period. Her research interests include nursing history and professional issues in nursing, with a growing focus on the history of nursing education. She is a former recipient of the Teresa E. Christy Award of the American Association of the History of Nursing for excellence of historical research and writing.

Susanne Malchau Dietz is Historian in Residence at the Danish Museum of Nursing History and President of the Danish Society of Nursing History and was formerly Associate Professor and Head of Research at the UC Danish Deaconess Foundation in Copenhagen. She is the Founding President of the European Association for the History of Nursing. Her field of research is nursing history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on the nursing traditions of deaconesses and women religious and their impact on the development of professional nursing and the Nordic welfare model. Professor Malchau Dietz is author of a monograph history of the deaconesses at the Danish Deaconess Foundation, entitled Gender, Vocation and Professional Competence.

Martin S. McNamara is Dean of Nursing and Head of School at the University College Dublin School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health Systems. He holds master’s degrees in social science, education and nursing and a doctor of education (EdD) degree from the Open University. Dr McNamara is a writer and commentator on professional nursing, with a particular interest in academic identity, disciplinary development and the history of the profession. He has published several scholarly articles and book contributions on aspects of nursing history and professional identity and has co-authored (with Gerard Fealy and Sean Lucey) Equal Citizens: Sunbeam House, 1874–2014 (SHT, 2014), a monograph history of one of Ireland’s largest disability services.

Pamela J. Wood is Associate Professor at the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Healthcare and Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Health at Federation University Australia. A nursing historian, she created and ran a postgraduate course in nursing history in New Zealand for over ten years, and supervised many master’s and PhD students undertaking historical inquiry in nursing and midwifery. She explores the ways that nurses can engage their ‘historical imagination’ and use knowledge of the past to inform contemporary nursing practice and professional concerns. She also examines the history of health beliefs and practices, particularly focusing on domestic health guides. Her research has included an exploration of the way nurses developed new areas of practice in the marginal settings of the rural ‘backblocks’ or bush, urban slums and war, and is author of a social and cultural history of public health in New Zealand in the nineteenth century, entitled Dirt: Filth and Decay in a New World Arcadia (Auckland University Press, 2005).

Preface

I am proud to be able to write that Histories of Nursing Practice is based on papers presented at the international nursing history conference ‘Nursing History in a Global Perspective’, held in Denmark in August 2012. The conference took place at the beautiful and historical Hotel Koldingfjord in Kolding, where the Danish Museum of Nursing History is also situated. The Danish Society of Nursing History, the Danish Museum of Nursing History and the Danish Nurses’ Organisation hosted the conference.

It was also at this conference that the European Association for the History of Nursing (EAHN) was launched and I was elected its first President. Today, the EAHN has thirteen nursing history associations, with members representing thirteen European countries. The members communicate through the EAHN Annual Bulletin, a website and the annual meeting hosted by a member association. In 2013 the EAHN meeting was held in Kaiserswerth of Düsseldorf, Germany, in Dublin, Ireland, in 2014 and in 2015 the meeting took place in Tromsø, Norway.

The idea of an association representing nursing historians in Europe began in 2005 when the then President of the American Association for the History of Nursing (AAHN), Dr Arlene W. Keeling, invited European scholars to jointly host a conference with AAHN in Europe. A European Nursing History Group (ENHG) was formed and, in partnership with AAHN, hosted a very successful international conference at Royal Holloway University of London in September 2010. On the last day of the conference, the historians representing the ENHG and other interested delegates met and agreed to pursue the idea of establishing a European association. The group accepted my invitation to a meeting at the Danish Deaconess Foundation in Copenhagen in March 2011. To organise the meeting, a steering committee was appointed, consisting of Dr Christine Hallett, Dr Gerard Fealy and myself. At the Copenhagen meeting, the terms of reference of EAHN were drafted and a year later finally confirmed at a meeting held at the Danish Museum of Nursing History. The mission of the European Association for the History of Nursing (EAHN) is to promote the development and advancement of nursing history through scholarly work and public outreach. The association brings individuals and associations together in order to provide mutual support and opportunities for collaboration.

The establishment of EAHN was the result of a long-held desire to cross national borders in Europe, to strengthen our bonds, and to unite the project of nursing history in the European countries, from north to south and from east to west. We were already tightly connected as citizens of the European Union member countries and we were related even before the founding of the union, despite various attempts through history to break down the individual national identities. We share the same roots and culture as human beings as well as in our studies of nurses and nursing.

The origins of professional or modern nursing emerged in medieval Italy with the introduction of the Rule of St Benedict in the sixth century AD, in Renaissance France with the Daughters of Charity, in the nineteenth century in Germany with the deaconess movement, and in England with Florence Nightingale. The idea of nursing has always crossed national borders and has been practised no matter what the political circumstances or conflicts of the time.

However, when it comes to investigating the impact and significance of nursing – a 1,500-year period of nursing history – it is often limited to our individual nations and colonies and to our native languages. The aim of EAHN is to change this and to encourage history scholars to widen the scope of research and explore the fact that we are all European citizens with a shared professional and cultural inheritance.

The conference at Kolding in August 2012 provided both the launch platform for the EAHN and the opportunity to promote the mission of the new association. The interest in the conference was immense and 150 scholars from all over the world assembled in Denmark. The volume of submitted abstracts was remarkable, representing a wide range of topics in the history of nursing and a truly global historiography. The scope of research was so extensive that Dr Christine Hallett, Dr Gerard Fealy and I conceived the idea of an edited volume based on selected papers from the conference. We decided to give priority to an under-researched theme in nursing history: nursing practice. During the conference we approached prospective contributors for the volume, which we have titled Histories of Nursing Practice, and we are most grateful to the many scholars who so willingly agreed to contribute to this important subject matter in nursing history. Thank you so much for making this book possible. We are also grateful to The Danish Society for Nursing History for funding the work of indexing the book. For my part, I wish the reader a scholarly, enjoyable and enlightening journey in the footsteps of our foremothers in nursing practice.

Dr Susanne Malchau Dietz

President, Danish Society of Nursing History and President of the European Association for the History of Nursing

Copenhagen, October 2014

Introduction: Histories of nursing practice

Christine E. Hallett   and Gerard M. Fealy

Introduction

The history of nursing has been referred to as a ‘nascent discipline’ for approximately the last forty years. Its struggle for identity has been a long and tortuous one, mirroring the nursing profession’s own struggle for recognition. Negotiating a hazardous and shifting territory between the better-established fields of medical history, women’s history and social history (and with more than a passing nod to cultural studies), historians of nursing have often been distracted by the lure of greater credibility within these more ‘mainstream’ disciplines. Yet, their work benefited from the healthy exchange of ideas: an exchange which enriched the process by which scholars charted the complex past of the nursing profession and its practices. More powerful subject areas have offered support – and, in doing so, have exerted peculiar pressures, resulting in a slightly skewed perspective: one which focuses on professional identity and development, rather than on practice.

From the earliest empirical histories, such as Brian Abel Smith’s A History of the Nursing Profession and Christopher Maggs’s The Origins of General Nursing,¹ through the ‘social and cultural turn’ prompted by women’s historians such as Celia Davies (Gender and the Professional Predicament