Tag: nursing history
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)
Because, let’s face it – who has time to catch up on all the journal articles published in Canadian history?
Welcome back to the Best New Articles series, where each month, I post a list of my favourite new articles! Don’t forget to also check out my favourites from previous months, which you can access by clicking here.
This month I read articles from:
- Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 2017)
- Quebec Studies 63 (June 2017)
- CAML Review 45, no. 1 (April 2017)
- Acadiensis 47, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2017)
- Histoire Sociale/Social History 50, no. 101 (May 2017)
- Archivaria 83 (Spring 2017)
- Journal of Canadian Studies 50, no. 1 (Spring 2016)
- Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 10, vol. 2 (Spring 2017)
Here are my favourites:
Welcome back to our monthly series, “Upcoming Publications in Canadian History,” where I’ve compiled information on all the new and upcoming releases for the following month in the field of Canadian history from every Canadian academic press, all in one place. This includes new books in both English and French. To see last month’s releases, click here.