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. They provided care, sustenance, help for orphans and protection of those suffering from the violence. Several authors have described the politics and humanitarianism of organisations that flew nightly shipments of food and medicines to a starving population in the southeast region during the war.2 As these accounts are told, the relief work was essentially a European and American enterprise. Yet examination of healthcare activities at the local level reveals both Irish Catholic missionaries and Nigerians themselves working collaboratively to care for the ill and
. The Crimean War demonstrated that nursing was becoming a knowledge-based practice. It is striking how much difference it made when doctors and nurses were willing to teach neophytes, whether educated ladies, dressing soldiers, or British and Turkish orderlies. Even more striking is the transnational humanitarianism of the nurses, who came from all classes and five different backgrounds. Despite all the restrictions and obstacles these men and women faced, all managed to relieve some of the sufferings of their patients. Even the Ottoman doctors, who at best could
Colonial Caring covers over a century of colonial nursing by nurses from a wide range of countries including: Denmark, Britain, USA, Holland and Italy; with the colonised countries including South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Ethiopia, Nigeria, India, Indonesia (Dutch East Indies) and the Danish West Indies. It presents unique perspectives from which to interrogate colonialism and post-colonialism including aspects of race, cultural difference and implications of warfare and politics upon nursing. Viewing nursing’s development under colonial and post-colonial rule reveals different faces of a profession that superficially may appear to be consistent and coherent, yet in reality is constantly reinventing itself. Considering such areas as transnational relationships, class, gender, race and politics, this book aims to present current work in progress within the field, to better understand the complex entanglements in nursing’s development as it was imagined and practised in local imperial, colonial and post-colonial contexts. Taking a chronologically-based structure, early chapters examine nursing in situations of conflict in the post-Crimean period from the Indian Rebellion to the Anglo-Boer War. Recruitment, professionalisation of nursing and of military nursing in particular, are therefore considered before moving deeper into the twentieth century reflecting upon later periods of colonialism in which religion and humanitarianism become more central. Drawing from a wide range of sources from official documents to diaries, memoirs and oral sources, and using a variety of methodologies including qualitative and quantitative approaches, the book represents ground-breaking work.
This volume aims to disclose the political, social and cultural factors that influenced the sanitary measures against epidemics developed in the Mediterranean during the long nineteenth century. The contributions to the book provide new interdisciplinary insights to the booming field of ‘quarantine studies’ through a systematic use of the analytic categories of space, identity and power. The ultimate goal is to show the multidimensional nature of quarantine, the intimate links that sanitary administrations and institutions had with the territorial organization of states, international trade, the construction of national, colonial, religious and professional identities or the configuration of political regimes. The circum-Mediterranean geographical spread of the case studies contained in this volume illuminates the similarities and differences around and across this sea, on the southern and northern shores, in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Italian, English and French-speaking domains. At the same time, it is highly interested in engaging in the global English-speaking community, offering a wide range of terms, sources, bibliography, interpretative tools and views produced and elaborated in various Mediterranean countries. The historical approach will be useful to recognize the secular tensions that still lie behind present-day issues such as the return of epidemics or the global flows of migrants and refugees.
Explaining how leprosy was considered in various historical settings by referring to categories of uncleanliness in antiquity, is problematic. The book historicizes how leprosy has been framed and addressed. It investigates the history of leprosy in Suriname, a plantation society where the vast majority of the population consisted of imported slaves from Africa. The relationship between the modern stigmatization and exclusion of people affected with leprosy, and the political tensions and racial fears originating in colonial slave society, exerting their influence until after the decolonization up to the present day. The book explores leprosy management on the black side of the medical market in the age of slavery as contrasted with the white side. The difference in perspectives on leprosy between African slaves and European masters contributed to the development of the 'Great Confinement' policies, and leprosy sufferers were sent to the Batavia leprosy asylum. Dutch debates about leprosy took place when the threat of a 'return' of leprosy to the Netherlands appeared to materialise. A symbiotic alliance for leprosy care that had formed between the colonial state and the Catholics earlier in the nineteenth century was renegotiated within the transforming landscape of Surinamese society to incorporate Protestants as well. By 1935, Dutch colonial medicine had dammed the growing danger of leprosy by using the modern policies of detection and treatment. Dutch doctors and public health officials tried to come to grips with the Afro-Surinamese belief in treef and its influence on the execution of public health policies.
issues of race and ethnicity associated with segregation and ‘protection’. The discussions are then taken further into the twentieth century for the final third of the book, reflecting upon Italian colonialism in Ethiopia, guerrilla nursing in China by British and American nurses and Irish Catholic missionary doctors and nurses working in colonial and post-colonial Nigeria. In these chapters, religion and humanitarianism – as well as nursing in the face of stark inhumanity – become part of the equation, whilst relationships between colonised and colonisers is explored
assault were, the doctors were performing up to eighty or a hundred operations every day. The Sisters were hard pressed distributing dry linen, hot drinks, and wine. The weather was windy, cold, and rainy and often they had to dress the wounded in the open air in the rain, on their knees on the wet ground or in the mud. 14 The reorganization of the community Although he had sworn he would never return to the Crimea, Pirogov’s humanitarianism got the better of his resolve. After a rest of two months he returned with a
little weight against such a definitive act of humanitarianism. Indeed, to oppose such programmes must represent at best ignorance, and at worst an absolute evil. One of the great virologists of the twentieth century, Alfred Prince, co-discoverer of the hepatitis B virus and creator of one of the first inexpensive hepatitis B vaccines, who was also a social activist fighting for mass hepatitis B immunisation, was an interesting dissenter from
stories provides a different perspective, allowing us to focus on the ‘lives of unknown or lesser known figures so as to explore what their experiences can offer to our understanding of an era, a movement or a culture’.2 Their experiences illuminate the intersections of power with the matrix of faith, gender, class, race and place that shaped FAU nurses’ work as civil war spread like wildfire. Forced to renegotiate the fragile frontiers of its pacifist humanitarianism to maintain its organisational integrity, the Convoy became the only Western aid agency to gain access
International Red Cross movement in Spain and as a relentless promoter of the cause of war humanitarianism in both national and international medical and legal forums. Yet, the professional activities related to the causes and prevention of epidemics which he mostly undertook in the early stage of his career – between 1854 and 1864 – make him a suggestive case study to illustrate the controversies on contagion and quarantine in Spain and Europe at the time. These were mostly focused on cholera and yellow fever, regarding epidemics involving civil or military populations, in