"Tradition and transformation": Recent scholarship in Canadian nursing history

Journal of Canadian Studies, Fall 1999 by Quiney, Linda

She Answered Every Call: The Life ofPublic Health Nurse, Mona Gordon Wilson (1894-1981). Douglas O. Baldwin. Charlottetown: Indigo Press, 1997.

The Women of Royaumont: A Scottish Women's Hospital on the Western Front. Eileen Crofton. East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 1997

The Military Nurses of Canada: Recollections of Canadian Military Nurses. Vol. 1 E.A. Landells, ed. Whiterock, BC: Co-Publishing, 1995.

Bedside Matters: The Transformation of Canadian Nursing, 1900-1990. Kathryn McPherson. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Nobody Ever Wins a Wan The World War I Diaries of Ella Mae Bongard, R.N. Eric Scott, ed. Ottawa: Janeric Enterprises, 1997.

Jean I Gunn: Nursing Leader. Natalie Riegler. Markham: A.M.S./Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1997.

Canadian nursing history is strongly rooted in conventional biography and the descriptive narrative style. Consequently, the careful recording of events and preservation of archival material has ensured a rich resource for future research in nursing's early development and its notable leaders (Gibbon and Mathewson). While recording the contributions of exceptional nurses, this method necessarily limits analysis of the role of the wider community of nursing practitioners, preventing comprehensive understanding of nursing's history and development and its place in the history of women's work. In 1991, historian Veronica Strong-Boag confidently predicted that "the history of nurses is changing women's history and the history of Canada"; she noted a new interest in nurses and nursing among social historians as they began to question nursing's relationship to issues of gender, class and race (231). Yet historians Kathryn McPherson and Meryn Stuart have cautioned that not all nursing scholars welcome these new "historical studies informed or motivated by political theory," and many prefer that nursing history mainly serve nursing's own interests (18). This conservative approach history has led to cautious consideration of nursing within the broader context of Canadian social history. By comparison, in the 1980s American scholarship took the lead in examining the work and culture of nursing. New interpretations by American historians Barbara Melosh in "The Physician's Hand": Work, Culture and Conflict ill American Nursing (1982) and Susan Reverby in Ordered to Care: the Dilemma of American Nursing, 1856-1945 (1987), directed American nursing scholarship towards labour history as a model for analysis. Until recently, Canadian nursing lacked a similar analytical framework for interpretation of its own historical development.

The history of nursing in Canada spans the centuries; before the religious nursing orders brought to the continent by the earliest European colonists were the healing practices of Aboriginal peoples. Yet nursing as an organised and structured profession for Canadian women dates only from the late nineteenth century, when the Victorian enthusiasm for order and institution building gave rise to the development of the hospital system (Rosenberg). The regularised training of Canadian nurses was initiated as educated, single, young women were recruited to prepare for certification as graduate nurses over a two- or three-year period while working on the hospital wards. The new century saw the evolution of standardised, professional nursing in Canada, with much credit due to a generation of remarkable leaders, each of whom put a distinctive stamp on her own training programme. The history of these inspired women has dominated the wider development of Canadian nursing history into the 1990s, but the achievements of the much larger force of working nurses who trained in the schools, served in the field of public health, and were a major component in the development of a much-heralded Canadian hospital-care system, deserves equal scrutiny; Kathryn McPherson's Bedside Matters: The Transformation of Canadian Nursing, 1900-1990 has finally given Canadian nursing history its own comprehensive analysis.

McPherson situates her study within the history of woman's work, employing the "tools of social history to probe the everyday lives of 'ordinary' nurses at work" (2), specifically the analytical categories of gender, class and race. By this means, Bedside Matters explores the world of nursing from the ward corridors, rather than from the offices of the nursing supervisors. Oral histories and archival material are woven into a fabric that includes student workbooks, hospital records, and the minutes of nursing associations, illustrating the historical transformation of Canadian nursing on several levels. The reader thus observes both the uncertain young student becoming a confident graduate and the evolution of the work and culture of nursing over 90 years, from its inception as a new career for women into a profession under stress. McPherson claims that a substantial portion of this stress has developed from within, through conflicting visions of nursing as, to some, a skilled profession and, to others, as "women's work." Gender-based perceptions of nursing have devalued both the status and wage base of nursing. Struggles between the nursing and medical administrations of training hospitals, as well as the internecine conflicts between nursing leaders and teachers to promote their own priorities have contributed to the continuing efforts of trained nurses for recognition as skilled practitioners, rather than hospital workers.