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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.
a “modest” approach to the affairs of life’.3 Ultimately, acknowledgement of this more sceptical tradition might similarly have been made by the generations of doctors since 1890. Medical misadventure is inevitable, but if the experience of nineteenth-century practitioners is at all illustrative, its deployment for setting professional boundaries has been misconceived. Notes 1 St Andrew’s Healthcare Archive, Northampton, CL4 Northampton General Lunatic Asylum case notes 1862–67, p. 502; ‘The suicide of a Birmingham surgeon’, Birmingham Daily Post 12 June 1882, p
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.
Victorian medical men could suffer numerous setbacks on their individual paths to professionalisation, and Thomas Elkanah Hoyle's career offers a telling exemplar. This book addresses a range of the financial, professional, and personal challenges that faced and sometimes defeated the aspiring medical men of England and Wales. Spanning the decades 1780-1890, from the publication of the first medical directory to the second Medical Registration Act, it considers their careers in England and Wales, and in the Indian Medical Service. The book questions the existing picture of broad and rising medical prosperity across the nineteenth century to consider the men who did not keep up with professionalising trends. Financial difficulty was widespread in medical practice, and while there are only a few who underwent bankruptcy or insolvency identified among medical suicides, the fear of financial failure could prove a powerful motive for self-destruction. The book unpicks the life stories of men such as Henry Edwards, who could not sustain a professional persona of disinterested expertise. In doing so it uncovers the trials of the medical marketplace and the pressures of medical masculinity. The book also considers charges against practitioners that entailed their neglect, incompetence or questionable practice which occasioned a threat to patients' lives. The occurrence and reporting of violent crime by medical men, specifically serious sexual assault and murder is also discussed. A tiny proportion of medical practitioners also experienced life as a patient in an asylum.
. Shifting work and gender boundaries As nurses extended and expanded their work beyond the ‘normal’ remit of nursing practice,7 the gender and professional boundaries between medicine and nursing blurred. On active service overseas nurses increasingly ‘stood in’ for their medical colleagues as the exigencies of war demanded. One sister, part of the BEF evacuating Marseilles in June 1940, wrote that the colonel of her unit asked her about the medical fitness or otherwise of the patients: ‘He said he could not find the M.O. to ask him. I gave my opinion.’8 Sister Mary
, its impact was rarely obvious or clear-cut. The example of prisons suggests that HIV/AIDS activism should be conceived more broadly, to incorporate covert action, activities that tested professional boundaries, and individual risk-taking, even when those actions did not prompt immediate or obvious change. Interventions to improve policies or conditions concerning HIV/AIDS and prisons rarely made the
as a confrontation between contagionism and anticontagionism (miasmatism). The authors reflect on how opinions about quarantine acted as professional boundary markers for medical bodies and individual doctors within them. A first approach is made by Lisa Rosner in Chapter 5, focusing on a particular group of British doctors, those practising with the Royal Navy. She argues that in the early nineteenth century, these physicians usually acquired their first experience of quarantine in the Mediterranean. It was an established practice for navy doctors to spend the
trained French nurses of the right sort were to be had?14 The dearth of trained nurses in France was the result of several factors. First, the great degree of central state control over social welfare and education had placed constraints on the autonomy of voluntary agencies and limited women’s access to professional education. Furthermore, other professions, such as medicine, remained protective of their professional boundaries, limiting the role of nurses in the community. According to historian Katrin Schultheiss, in France, a visiting nurse could only enter a
. Fierens’ collision with the Ghent society members nicely illustrates the gradual process by which scientific standards and codes of conduct, reinforced in medical societies, eroded this older tradition of medical authority and established the boundaries of the medical field. The conflict reveals in this way the intertwinement of new forms of scientific practice with the professional boundary-work of the mid-nineteenth century. Both were based on the idea that one’s colleagues should be the primary judges of the validity of one’s medical claims and conduct. The
project. The College and its leading figures were keen proponents of structured general practice and shared care schemes, and received support from significant specialists in the field. Moreover, they collaborated with the other Royal Colleges, and with specialists in the BDA, to create guidelines and conduct service reviews of new programmes, highlighting how shared interests could transcend professional boundaries. The coalescing of these institutions around technologies of management suggests that this period saw the emergence of new visions of