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Negotiating nursing explores how the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (Q.A.s) salvaged men 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 physically, emotionally and spiritually from the battlefield and for the war, despite concerns about their presence on the frontline. The book maps the developments in nurses’ work as the Q.A.s created a legitimate space for themselves in war zones and established nurses’ position as the expert at the bedside. Using a range of personal testimony the book demonstrates how the exigencies of war demanded nurses alter the methods of nursing practice and the professional boundaries in which they had traditionally worked, in order to care for their soldier-patients in the challenging environments of a war zone. Although they may have transformed practice, their position in war was highly gendered and it was gender in the post-war era that prevented their considerable skills from being transferred to the new welfare state, as the women of Britain were returned to the home and hearth. The aftermath of war may therefore have augured professional disappointment for some nursing sisters, yet their contribution to nursing knowledge and practice was, and remains, significant.
spaces. While African nurses were not tools of biomedical practices, they nonetheless made it easy for African patients to adjust to clinical experiences. As cultural interlocutors, African nurses were central in translating African conceptions of afflictions to white medical personnel, simultaneously translating western medicine to African patients. It was nurses’ responsibility to acquire the correct information for doctors and to make the diagnosis easier. 5 African nurses’ presence within hospitals reassured many patients that they were being served by their own
men in readiness to return to battle. Nursing sisters thus created a space for themselves in front-line duties. The chapter demonstrates that the use of humour to support healing helped to dispel anxieties about impropriety in the encounter between young single women and vulnerable male 94 Nursing presence soldiers and to further support nurses’ presence in the masculine world of war. The chapter then examines the morale-boosting presence of nurses outside the hospital ward as they became dance partners, dinner guests and potential wives for healthy male
hospitals and casualty clearing stations (CCSs) were situated. The construction of these spaces of safety demanded ingenuity and improvisation on the part of the nursing sisters as they developed wards into homelike places. The importance of the nurses’ presence in war zones and the contradictions inherent in their position as women in places of danger are explored in Chapter 3. Military success depended on men sustaining a determination to fight. Persuading men to continue or returning men to combat after illness or injury depended on maintaining their morale. On active
likely to be widely publicised. Hence, their nursing work could therefore be re-cast as patriotic service and could be interpreted as a highly political act. Key to the success of the female nurses’ presence in the early days of wartime nursing was the image of Florence Nightingale as ‘saintly warrior’, genteel and self-sacrificing, and this trope continued to be used to protect the image of the military nurse well into the twentieth century.30 The focus of this book is on the nature of nursing work and its 7 One hundred years of wartime nursing practices impact on
their children. Yet they tried by all means to limit African nurses’ presence in white hospitals.’ 17 Just like Flora Matondo, progressives like Levy also pointed out such contradictions within Rhodesian society: Virtually every European family in this country live in close relationship with African servants of lower educational levels than these girls (nurses). How absurd is it not to be nursed by one of them when they are sick. The consequence of this bigoted and discriminatory policy is that both sides suffer. African girls cannot get jobs for which they have
suspected an ailment they were familiar with, they would suggest it to the doctor. 95 African nurses’ presence within hospitals was reassuring for many patients that they were being nursed by their own. Towards this end, nurses drew upon their cultural understanding of disease causation in helping patients understand and negotiate different healthcare options. 96 Just as in other parts of the continent and like their predecessors, African nurses in Rhodesia thus played a pivotal role as cultural brokers between African and western health systems. 97 As interlocutors
justice reporting from the Paris slums, and the only woman journalist on the Egyptian Mail in Cairo) to the Woman Teacher (on improving the life-chances of ‘backward’ children in deprived areas and educational tours of Soviet Russia). 55 The Nursing Mirror and Midwives’ Journal , though founded earlier (1888), also reported on women’s engagement with the public sphere, including nurses’ presence in field hospitals during the Spanish Civil War. From January 1937 onwards the Journal carried articles on subjects such as the use of canned blood for transfusions on