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Session 4: Nurses and midwives in the control of infectious diseases

 

Session 4: Nurses and midwives in the control of infectious diseases


Session Outline

This session will introduce students to the concepts of infection control as they operated in a range of historical contexts.  It will consider nurses' and midwives' perspectives on asepsis, antisepsis, hygiene and cleanliness.  It will give students the opportunity to examine nurses' and midwives' perspectives on infection and to understand the ways in which infection control was introduced into education and practice.  It will also consider how infection control has been used both as part of the justification for professionalisation, and as a focus for the critique of the professions.

Session leader

Christine Hallett


Aims

  • - To permit students to examine nurses' and midwives perspectives on ‘infection control' in historical context
  • - To offer an insight into the ways in which the development of nursing practice was influenced by prevailing theories of infection
  • - To provide an understanding of how public health practice developed in response to developments in knowledge of infection

Content of the session

  • - The development of ‘germ theory' in the nineteenth century and its implications for nursing practice
  • - The introduction of Listerian antisepsis from the 1860s and its impact on nursing
  • - The influence of theories of puerperal fever/puerperal sepsis on midwifery/obstetric practice
  • - The impact of germ theory, antisepsis and asepsis on hospital and community nursing practice in the twentieth century
  • - Nursing and midwifery perspectives on asepsis, antisepsis, hygiene and cleanliness
  • - Developments in knowledge of infectious diseases during the twentieth century, and their influence on public health nursing
  • - Popular critiques of nursing, hygiene and infection control in the late twentieth century (the ‘too posh to wash' debate)

Teaching methods to be used

Pre-reading, tutorials and seminar presentations

Indicative Reading

Dormandy, T. (2003) Moments of Truth, Wiley, Chichester.

Fisher, R.B. (1977) Joseph Lister, 1827-1912, Macdonald and Jane's, London.

Gaw, J.L. (1999) ‘A Time to Heal': the diffusion of Listerism in Victorian Britain, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

Granshaw, L. (1992) ‘"Upon this principle I have based a practice': the development and reception of antisepsis in Britain, 1867-90', In Pickstone, J.V. (ed.) Medical Innovations in Historical Perspective, St. Martin's Press, New York.

Lawrence, C. (1994) Medicine in the Making of Modern Britain. Routledge. London.

Luckes, Eva. (1898) General Nursing, Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co, London.

Loudon, I. (1987) Puerperal fever, the streptococcus and the sulphonamides, 1911-1945, British Medical Journal, 295, 485-490.

Loudon, I. (1991) On maternal and infant mortality: 1990-1960, Social History of Medicine, 4, 1, 29-73.

Loudon, I. (1993) Death in Childbirth: An International Study of Maternity Care and Maternal Mortality, 1800-1950, Clarendon Press, London.

Loudon, I. (1995) Childbed Fever: a documentary history, Garland Publications, New York.

Loudon, I. (2000) The Tragedy of Childbed Fever, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Norris, R. (1891) Norris's Nursing Notes, Sampson Low, Marston and Co. Ltd. London

Pelling, M. (1993) ‘Contagion/Germ Theory/Specificity. In Bynum, W.F. and Porter, R. (eds.) Companion Encyclopaedia of the History of Medicine. Volume I. Routledge. London and New York.

Rosenberg C E (1979) Florence Nightingale on contagion: The hospital as moral universe. In: Rosenberg C E (ed.) Healing and History: Essays for Charles Rosen, Science History Publications, Dawson.

Sotney, Emily, (1900) Bacteriology and Surgical Technique for Nurses, W.B. Saunders and Co, London.

Tomes, Nancy (1998) The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life, Harvard University Press.

Donnison, J. (1999) Midwives and Medical Men, Second Edition, Phillimore, London

Worboys, M. (2000) Spreading Germs.  Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865-1900, Cambridge University Press.