European Journal for Nursing History and Ethics (ENHE)
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“…I was thinking, when doing this scrubbing, of Miss Florence Nightingale’s barracks…”: A Local Typhoid Epidemic in the Correspondence between a Bulgarian and an American Nurse in 1932 (Nevena Sendova and Clara Noyes)
Get PDFOne of the most important epidemics in Bulgaria in the 1930s was typhoid fever. The research focuses on the description of this disease in a small town in Southern Bulgaria in 1932 in a letter written by a leading Bulgarian nurse, the Director of the Sofia School of Nursing, Nevena Sendova (1895–1987), to Clara Noyes (1869–1936), National Director Nursing Service of the Red Cross in the USA. Together with two of her colleagues and four students from the School of Nursing in Sofia, Nevena Sendova came to the small town of Bratsigovo in order to support local hygiene and anti-epidemic measures and to teach the accompanying students. At that time, the number of professional nurses in Bulgaria was small and there were no local nurses in this town. The letter is a rare egodocument about a local epidemic from the point of view of a nurse. It is part of a large regular correspondence between the directors of the Sofia School of Nursing and the leading nurses of the American Red Cross. These exchanges continued for about 15 years after American Red Cross nurses supported the reform of the Sofia School of Nursing in the 1920s along the same lines as the American education model. While describing the nurses’ activities in the two hospitals of the small town during the typhoid epidemic, Nevena Sendova also described the poverty of the local population, its hygiene habits, and the local beliefs and superstitions. Moreover, she recounted what local people were saying about the illness, a topic she considered she ought to bring to Clara Noyes’ attention
“COVIDwear” and Health Care Workers. How Has the New Materiality of Clothing Affected Care Practices?
Get PDFThe pandemic fundamentally changed the material culture of clothing for care workers. If most of them wore already some sort of uniform, be it for hygienic reasons, be it to make their status visible, Covid19 profoundly transformed the clothing codes, beyond the mask. These new “protections” thoroughly changed the caring experiences in several aspects. As they enclose the body more intimately, working conditions became more laborious. The sensory land¬scapes of care (vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell) were fundamentally altered. Working rhythms had to be adopted as putting on the garments took longer. If care clothing had been characterised by a slow de-standardisation since the 1970s, the pandemic made a uniformed and medicalised uniform again mandatory
Nursing the Enemy in the First World War
Get PDFThis article explores the ethical dilemmas posed by the experience of nursing enemy or prisoner-of-war (POW) patients during the First World War. It asks two key questions. First, what was at stake in the evocation of the relationship between the female nurse and the enemy patient in nationalist images and narratives designed to justify a nation’s conduct in the war and to demonize the enemy? Second, how did both trained and volunteer nurses evoke the experience of nursing such patients in their diaries, letters and memoirs? It concludes that these writings reveal contradictory attitudes. Some nurses emphasized their role as ‘neutrals’, underscoring the importance of impartiality in their medical work in line with the transnational humanitarianism embodied in the symbol of the Red Cross. Others reproduced nationalist and xenophobic stereotypes. Such nurses presented the nursing of enemy patients as incompatible with their patriotic duty and therefore as less deserving – or, in some cases, as undeserving – of their care
Working in a ‘World of Hurt’. Nursing and Medical Care Following Facial Injury During World War One
Get PDFThis article aims to explore the impact of facial injury on British military personnel during the First World War. It focuses primarily on the Queen\u27s Hospital, Sidcup, which became the First World War’s major centre for maxillo-facial and plastic surgery in the UK, and considers some of the ethical dilemmas that medical and nursing personnel encountered. It focuses primarily on nursing care, as although the role of nurses in the First World War has been increasingly acknowledged and examined, the contribution of nurses to the devel-opment of this new specialism has hitherto been largely unexplored. It finds that although pioneering surgery and nursing care helped to restore men’s faces, many had to adjust to a much-altered body image as well as physical impairments that affected them for the rest of their lives. They often had to endure a series of oper¬ations and spend many months in hospital. There is no clear evidence of the long-term outcomes for the men who underwent treatment, due to a paucity of sources, which enables only tentative conclusions to be drawn. While tales of depression and withdrawal are often recounted, alternative narratives can be found of men who went on to live contented lives and find fulfilling work. The aftercare for these men, within the context of the development of social welfare, will also be examined. Among the ethical dilemmas that faced medical and nursing staff were those experienced across medical specialities in this and other wars; specifically that they had to conform to military discipline and that in restoring men’s health they also enabled their patients to be sent back to battle. Added to this was that maxillo-facial surgery was often experimental, as new tech¬niques were attempted but were not always successful
Protestant Nursing in Crisis? The Shortage of Deaconesses in the GDR Using the Example of the Evangelisch-Lutherisches Diakonissenhaus Leipzig
Get PDFIn der Forschung ist bekannt, dass die Zahl der pflegenden protestantischen Schwestern, der Diakonissen, bis Ende der 1930er-Jahre anstieg. Danach brach diese Entwicklung ein, was in der Diakonie zu breiten und langanhaltenden Debatten über die Weiterführung der protestantischen Pflegetradition und des solidarischen Lebensmodells der Diakonissen führte. Diese Debatten und ihre Ergebnisse wurden in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (DDR) im Gegensatz zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland und anderen westeuropäischen Ländern kaum untersucht. Der vorliegende Beitrag füllt eine Forschungslücke. Am Beispiel des Leipziger Diakonissenhauses wird darin die Entwicklung der Schwesternzahlen von der Gründung 1891 bis zum Ende der DDR herausgearbeitet und die Organisationsstruktur sowie Rekrutierungsstrategien dieser Institution vorgestellt. Der Fokus liegt auf der DDR-Zeit mit folgenden Fragestellungen: Welchen arbeitsrechtlichen Status hatten die Diakonissen? Wie ging man mit der rückgehenden Zahl der Diakonissen in der Pflege und in der Gemeinschaft um? Und wie gestaltete sich das Miteinander von Diakonissen und angestellten Krankenpfleger*innen im Krankenhausalltag?There is well-established research in Germany showing that the number of Protestant nursing sisters (deaconesses) increased until the end of the 1930s. This trend then ended, which lead to broad and long-lasting debates about the continuation of the Protestant nursing tradition and the solidarity-based life model of deaconesses. While these debates and their outcomes have been studied for the Federal Republic of Germany and other Western European countries, almost no such studies existed for the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This article therefore fills a research gap. Using the example of the Leipzig Deaconess House, it elaborates on the development of the number of nurses from its founding in 1891 to the end of the GDR and presents the institution’s organizational structure and recruitment strategies. It focuses on the GDR period and asks the following questions: What was the status of deaconesses under labour law? How were the declining numbers of deaconesses in nursing and in the community dealt with? And how did deaconesses and wage-earning nurses interact in everyday hospital life
Charles West and Catherine Wood and the Early Development of Children’s Nursing at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children 1852–1888
Get PDFThis article investigates the origins of children’s nursing in England through the work of Dr Charles West and Catherine Wood, who were instrumental in the development of paediatric nursing at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, England’s first in-patient hospital for sick children. It focuses on ideas developed by West and taken further by Wood, which demonstrated that sick children differed fundamentally from sick adults, both in how they reacted to disease and in their care needs, and how as result, sick children required specially trained nurses. The article uses the writings of both West and Wood, and also the extensive archives of the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, to explore the development of these ideas
The Birth and Rebirth of Fabiola, Patron Saint of Nursing: Hagiography, Female Piety and Salvation Through Care of the Sick in the Fourth and Nineteenth Centuries
Get PDFThis paper explores Belgian artist Francis Alÿs’ accidental discovery that Fabiola, the first patron saint of nursing, was a popular subject for amateur painters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This discovery led to Alÿs’ contemporary artwork entitled The Fabiola Project, which consists of more than 500 found amateur reproductions of the 1885 portrait of the saint by French artist Jean-Jacques Henner. Fabiola’s nineteenth-century popularity arose as a result of a wildly popular novel by Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, Fabiola; or, The Church of the Catacombs, which was published in 1854 in the midst of the Crimean War (1853–56). Wiseman’s exciting story and Henner’s serene image combined to make the long-forgotten figure of Fabiola material, establishing her as a familiar and popular nineteenth-century trope. Taking a material culture perspective on the nineteenth-century resurrection of Fabiola through both fiction and portraiture, it is argued that the Fabiola story reveals both the longevity and political utility of pious female archetypes. The paper discusses the life of Fabiola, as told by Jerome, focusing on the radical nature of her devotion to the physical care of the sick as an advanced form of asceticism and feminized religious practice. Picking up this thread on religious self-shaping through the work of care of the sick, it then turns to the resurgence of interest in Fabiola in the context of nineteenth-century debates by churchmen on both sides of the confessional divide concerning the appropriate expression of female piety. It argues that The Fabiola Project reveals an archive of devotion to the rehabilitated saint, whose popularity in fiction and visual culture provides a rare insight into the energizing of a Catholic ideal for nineteenth-century women as active workers and nurses to the sick poor
Barber-Surgeons, Nurses, Midwives: Cupping and the “Violet Ray” in the Everyday Practice of Non-Medical Healing Professions
Get PDFDer Beitrag untersucht den pflegegeschichtlichen Hintergrund zweier Objekte, die als Zufallsfund auf dem Dachboden einer Familie aufgetaucht sind, zu deren Vorfahren eine Hebamme und eine Krankenschwester gehören. Es handelt sich bei den Objekten aus dem Behandlungsalltag dieser zwei Frauen um ein Set Schröpfköpfe und einen sogenannten Hochfrequenzstrahlapparat. Letzterer wurde bislang in der Forschung hauptsächlich als ein Lifstyle-Produkt der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts und dessen Wunsch nach gesundheitlicher Selbstversorgung dargestellt. Der Beitrag zeigt nun anhand von Aussagen aus den Familien der Behandelnden, dass die Behandlung mit Schröpfköpfen wie auch die mit dem HFS-Apparat bis in die 1950er Jahre hinein Teil der (ärztlich verordneten) physikalischen Therapie war. Es wird sichtbar, dass die Grenzen zwischen den Behandlungspraktiken nicht-ärztlicher Heilberufe wie Hebammen, Krankenschwestern und Badern nicht scharf zu ziehen sind. Für die zukünftige Forschung zu medizingeschichtlichen Objekten gibt dieses Ergebnis den methodischen Impuls, bei der Quellenarbeit nicht vorschnell beschränkende Zuordnungen zu einzelnen Heilberufen vorzunehmen.This article examines the historical background of a chance find in the attic of a family among whose ancestors were a midwife and a nurse. The objects from the everyday practice of these two women are a set of cupping glasses and a so-called high-frequency radiation device (“violet ray”). The latter has so far been presented in research mainly as a lifestyle product of the first half of the 20th century and its desire for health self-care. The article now shows, based on statements from the practitioners\u27 families, that treatment with cupping glasses as well as with the HFR device was part of (medically prescribed) physical therapy until the 1950s. It becomes apparent that the boundaries between the treatment practices of non-medical healers such as midwives, nurses and barber-surgeons cannot be sharply drawn. For future research on objects in the history of medicine, this result provides the methodological impetus not to hastily make restrictive classifications of individual healing professions and their respective practices when working with sources
The Charlottenschrank. Born Out of a Nursing Shortage
Get PDFWeil helfende Hände zu allen Zeiten Mangelware waren und es auch heute noch sind, kam ein württembergischer Pfarrer Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts auf die Idee, die ländliche Bevölkerung wenigstens mit medizinischen Utensilien zu versorgen. Dafür wurde Gemeinden ein Schrank zur Verfügung gestellt, der unter der Bezeichnung „Charlottenschrank“ bekannt wurde.Helping hands have always been in short supply, so in order to provide the late nineteenth-century rural population of southwest Germany with a minimum of medical utensils, a pastor came up with the idea of providing communities with a cabinet that became known as the Charlottenschrank