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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.
affecting the population. During this epidemic more than 8,600 people died. While the epidemic and its social and political background have been researched elsewhere,3 the impact of the catastrophe on healthcare in the city, and especially on nursing, still have not. This chapter provides an analysis of public health and nursing issues in the city during the cholera epidemic and examines the changes in the city’s health administration and the nursing system after the epidemic. It focuses on the nursing response 123 Public health and nursing work and contribution to
sisters of the British Army were eventually posted to all war zones of the Second World War to care for combatants. The chapter maps the nursing practices on active service overseas that recovered men, including body care, feeding work, the management of pain and support for the dying. These four areas of nursing practice are commonly associated with nursing work, yet, in war zones, they demanded complex gendered brokery. The intimacy of body care, the moment when the single young female nurse meets the young male patient, required skilful negotiations in order to
a ‘new world’, and the knowledge of infectious diseases she acquired in her local hospital’s isolation block left her with hands like ‘raw meat from constant soaking in perchloride’.2 Most VADs began their brief nursing ‘careers’ on civilian wards, and many found this a source of frustration, because their primary motivation for undertaking nursing work had been to offer direct assistance to the ‘war effort’. Some offered their services to auxiliary hospitals belonging to the Red Cross or the Order of St John of Jerusalem. From the early spring of 1915, VADs were
Technological warfare work of the nurses through the trajectory of inmates from their initial evacuation from Camp I to the ‘human laundry’, where they were deloused and sprayed with DDT by German nurses, to their admission to the ever-expanding hospital in which the majority of the female nurses were employed. The nursing work in the hospital is then examined in more detail, focusing on the various aspects of clinical and psychological nursing work, including the care of diarrhoea, feeding and clothing patients and psychological rehabilitative care. Many of the sources used
the most honourable memorial to the suffering of their fellow countrymen. In writing of their nursing work during the First World War, nurses were also composing portraits of themselves. Whilst some seem to have wanted to remain shadowy figures in the background, foregrounding the courage and resilience of their patients, others chose to depict themselves as actors on a world stage.3 When they wrote, British women such as the Baroness de T’Serclaes, Sarah Macnaughtan, and Millicent Sutherland were drawing upon narrative tropes current in their own culture. The
9 ‘Those maggots – they did a wonderful job’: The nurses’ role in wound management in civilian hospitals during the Second World War David Justham The wound care practices of nurses that persisted into the Second World War period were reminiscent of the nineteenth-century sanitarian movement’s quest for cleanliness. It is the contention of this chapter that civilian nursing in the UK just before and during the Second World War was governed by a series of highly routinised practices affecting the totality of nursing work including wound care. Taken as a whole
turn, found themselves struggling with waves of seriously ill patients. 81 Industrial war This chapter focuses on the hitherto unexplored work of those allied nurses who were based in CCSs and base hospitals on the Western Front, and casts light on the hidden nature of nursing work. It also explores the idea that working with the victims of poison gas permitted nurses to identify themselves as significant participants in the allied war effort. Alongside their medical colleagues, nurses were able to implement life-saving, emergency interventions. But they were also
overseas. The first section explores extensions to the nursing role, most particularly in the care of wounds and burns. Both of 129 Negotiating nursing these areas of practice were part of the inventory of traditional nursing work, but the pressures of war demanded that all nurses should become adept at dealing with ever more complex treatments. Crucially for nursing sisters on active service, they were increasingly in charge of treatment regimes without medical supervision. The second section explores the expansion of nursing duties, those that had hitherto been the
almost a year. The Paris to which La Motte returned in October 1914 was much changed from what it had been when she set up her residence there in September 1913. 3 La Motte too had undergone a transformation in her focus and interests. Having completed her last report on militant suffragettes in London for the Sun , La Motte moved to Paris, where she determined to write her first book, published in 1915, the culmination of her professional nursing work, The Tuberculosis Nurse . This well-known subject matter