Nursing the English from Plague to Peterloo, 1660-1820 - (Nursing History and Humanities) by Alannah Tomkins (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book analyses the reputations and experiences of women and men who nursed the sick before any calls for nursing reform.

Book Synopsis

This book studies the negative stereotypes around the women who worked as sick nurses in this period and contrasts them with the lived experience of both domestic and institutional nursing staff. Furthermore, it integrates nursing by men into the broader history of care as a constant if little-recognised presence. It finds that women and men undertook caring work to the best of their ability, and often performed well, despite multiple threats to nurse reputations on the grounds of gender norms and social status. Chapters consider nursing in the home, in general hospitals, in specialist institutions like the Royal Chelsea Hospital and asylums, plus during wartime, illuminated by multiple accounts of individual nurses. In these settings, it employs the sociological concept of 'dirty work' to contextualise the challenges to nurses and nursing identities.

From the Back Cover

Nursing the English analyses the reputations and experiences of women and men who nursed the sick before any calls for nursing reform. Beginning in 1660, when the separation of sick nursing from childcare nursing can be dated to the final third of the seventeenth century, the study includes the last epidemic of plague. It concludes in 1820, the year of Florence Nightingale's birth, which also saw the first European publication calling for the founding of a Protestant nursing sisterhood--a movement that eventually propelled the drive for nurse training.

Chapters cover domestic nursing by women, the long history of nursing at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, the careers of women recruited to nurse in provincial infirmaries, and the lives of 'matrons' who nursed old soldiers at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. The final two chapters gather evidence for male nursing, exploring the conflicts with normative masculinity that faced male carers, and the ad hoc nursing by both women and men resulting from Britain's wars with France, 1793-1815. This volume decisively contradicts the stereotype of the pre-reform nurse as ignorant, illiterate and drunk, instead presenting her (and him) as working well in context.

Gender, status, and proximity to 'dirty work' are presented here as an essential framework for understanding the challenges of nursing before reform.

About the Author

Alannah Tomkins is a Professor of Social History at Keele University.