ABSTRACT
Although nursing history has considerably developed in the past few decades, the condition of British nurses in the eighteenth century has remained little studied. General accounts of the history of nursing tend to start from the early Victorian age, after a cursory and often derogatory look at Georgian hospital nursing. 1 Until recently pre-Victorian nurses were often described almost in the terms used by Florence Nightingale when she referred to workhouse nurses: 'those who were too old, too weak, too drunken, too dirty, too stolid, or too bad to do anything else.'2 It seems now likely that Nightingale overemphasized the contrast between old-style nurses and her ideal nurse in order to attract an entirely different social category of applicants to the job. What I intend to do in this chapter is to contribute to eliminate the simplistic stereotype of the pre-Nightinghale British nurse by a study of their working and living conditions in the Georgian 'infirmaries' between approximately 1730 and 1830.
