Session 8: Wartime nursing, 1853-1945
Session 8: Wartime nursing, 1853-1945
Session outline
The session will focus on the role and work of both professional and volunteer nurses during wartime. It will consider the work of the ‘Nightingale nurses' in the Crimea (1853-1856); the development of military nursing before and during the Second Boer War (1899-1902); the formation of Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (1902); and nursing during the First and Second World Wars (1914-1918; 1939-1945) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Teaching and discussion will focus on the work undertaken by nurses, though important background information on the development of nursing services, both professional and volunteer, will also be made available.
Session leaders
Christine Hallett; Isabel Anton
Aims
- - To offer students an insight into the work undertaken by nurses during wartime
- - To permit a focus on the innovative aspects of wartime nursing, and to encourage consideration of the extent to which nurses were ‘prime-movers' in developing innovative treatments
- - To offer an understanding of the impact of war in the development of nursing practice - and of the nursing services
Content of the session
- - The Nightingale nurses in the Crimea: realities and myths of the ‘reform' of military nursing practice
- - The development of the military nursing service from 1855 to 1902, with an emphasis on the importance of nursing practice, and how this differed from the work of military orderlies
- - The formation of the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service in 1902: its implications for nursing practice
- - The influence of military nursing on wound care and related trauma care
- - The influence of nursing and nurses on ‘medical' innovation during wartime: blood transfusion; the development of anaesthetics; innovative wound care practices; new approaches to the treatment of emotional trauma
- - The practice of nursing during the First and Second World Wars and during the Spanish Civil War; the importance of emergency work and triage in field hospitals and casualty clearing stations
Teaching methods
Pre-reading, tutorials and seminar presentations.
Indicative reading
Barham, P. (2004) Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War, Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
Bourke, Joanna (1996) Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War, Reaktion Books, London.
Brittain, Vera (1980 edition) Testament of Youth, Collins and Sons, Glasgow.
Cooke, Miriam and Woolacott, Angela (1993) Genering War Talk, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.
Cooter, R. and Harrison, M. and Sturdy, S. (1999) Medicine and Modern Warfare, Rodopi, Amsterdam.
Das, Santanu (2005) Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature, Cambridge University Press.
Farmborough, Florence (2000 edition) With the armies of the Tsar. A Nurse at the Russian Front in War and Revolution, 1914-1918. Cooper Square Press, New York.
Harrison, Mark (2004) Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the present day, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Higonnet, M. (1999) Lines of Fire. Women Writers of World War I, Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Higonnet, M. (2001) Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War, Northeastern University Press, Boston.
Higonnet, M; Jenson, J; Michel, S; Weitz, M.C. (1987) Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars. Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
McEwen, Y. (2006) It's a Long Way to Tipperary: British and Irish Nurses in the Great War, Cualann Press, Ltd, Dunfermline.
Ouditt, S. (1994) Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War, Routledge, London.
Rae, R. (2005) Scarlet Poppies: The army experience of Australian nurses during World War One, The College of Nursing, Australia, Burwood, NSW.
Reznick, J. (2004) Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the culture of caregiving in Britain during the Great War, Manchester University Press, Manchester.
Smith, A. (2000) The second battlefield: women, modernism and the First World War, Manchester University Press, Manchester.
Summers, Anne (2000 edition) Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses, 1854-1914, Threshold Press, Newbury, Berks.
Watson, J.S.K. (2002) Wars in the Wards: The Social Construction to Medical Work in First World War Britain, Journal of British Studies, 41: 484-510.