Tag: Naval history

‘Naval Hospital, Haslar, near Portsmouth: view from right. Coloured aquatint with etching by J. Wells, 1799, after J. Hall.’ by J. Revd. Hall. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY

Note from Stephanie: Hello everyone and welcome to the second of our 3-part series, based on a panel presentation given this past spring at the Canadian Historical Association annual conference in Regina, SK! You can read the first paper of the series here. Today’s essay comes to us from Erin Spinney, who will be discussing how the Digital Humanities help tell the stories of nurses who served in eigtheenth-century British naval hospitals. This year’s CHA was the first time I really had an opportunity to learn about Erin’s work, and it is truly fascinating and immersing research. Enjoy!

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Plymouth Naval Hospital employed over a thousand different women as nurses. Some like Honor Palmer, spent more than fifteen years of their lives, nursing in the service of the state. These women were part of the everyday fabric of the naval institutions and provided crucial medical care, ensured the cleanliness of hospital wards, and helped to enable a healthy healing environment through ventilation. Unfortunately, these women have been largely forgotten in nursing and medical history, or when they do enter into historical narratives, it is often to contrast the ‘superior’ practices of post-Nightingale nursing in the late-nineteenth century. For instance, American nursing leaders Lavinia Dock and Adelaide Nutting described the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century nursing as “the darkest known period in the history of nursing,” when nursing had “sank to an indescribable level of degredation.” (1) This description, intended to bolster the professionalization efforts of the new Nightingale nurses, would continue to frame the historiographical depictions of pre-Nightingale nurses throughout the twentieth century until the present day. (2)

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