ABSTRACT
The history of nursing in England is a young subject. Until the late twentieth century, it was dominated by Whiggish accounts of nursing’s relentless progress from an occupation dominated by old and destitute widows to the scientific profession it presents today. Pursued, in the main, by enthusiastic amateurs (often nurses or ex-nurses), nursing history has been dominated by hagiographic accounts of nineteenth-century reformers, chief among whom was Florence Nightingale (Woodham-Smith 1950; Pavey 1938). Until very recently, despite its obvious connections to the changing role of women in society and, more specifically, to women as workers, its history has been discussed without any reference to such themes. Shifts in historical thinking (such as the rise of social history in the 1960s and 1970s, and the emergence of labour history, women’s and gender history) passed it by and it continued to be the domain of heroic self-congratulation (Evans 2000). Perhaps, as Celia Davies has suggested, its history suffered as a result of nursing being almost exclusively populated by women (Davies 1980). On the surface, there were no power struggles between the sexes for gender historians; neither could they focus on heroic fights for the recognition of women’s right to practise, as nursing was regarded as a naturally female task. Further, there appeared to be no opportunity to study the development of a body of knowledge, as nursing could lay claim to no such unique and cohesive collection through which it defined itself (Davies 1980). More recently, these assumptions have been challenged, and today nursing history has been placed in a wider context, opening up questions about its relationship with medicine, and how it came to be regarded as the subordinate discipline. The politics of nursing has taken centre stage in these new histories, but studies of the nature of the women who chose to become nurses continue to be elusive. This book will argue that the development of nursing can only be properly understood if more focus is brought to bear on the lives of the women who worked on the wards. It will use one London hospital, St George’s, as a case study, to follow the development of a nursing department in the second half of the nineteenth century in detail. The results, which are discussed in the context of
the wider subject of women’s work in late nineteenth-century England, challenge commonly held assumptions about the reform of nursing in the nineteenth century.
