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

Journal of Canadian Studies, Fall 1999 by Quiney, Linda

Health care has become a critical area for discussion and dispute and nursing is one of its vital components. Recent contributions to the scholarship on nursing history demonstrate a new interpretative model that moves beyond studies of exceptional individuals, to consider the special position of nurses within the history of women's work. The analytic categories of gender, class and race connect this work to the wider scope of Canadian social history, enriching both. New methods do not negate the value of biography as an historical tool, but call for a more analytic approach. Whether in the development of a new society, in the crisis of war, or the construction of the modern urban, commercial-industrial landscape, nurses have been present, as volunteer caregivers or trained professionals. Recognition of nursing's role as a part of the history of women's work can only advance the scholarship of Canadian social, political and economic history.

Notes

1. For the single historical survey devoted to Canadian military nursing, see G.W.L. Nicholson Canada's Nursing Sisters. There are only brief references to nursing in Ruth Roach Pierson's "They're Still Women After All."

2. See an early recollection by Mabel Brown Clint called Our Bit. More recent, but brief, is Aj. B. Johnston's "Into the Great War."

Works Cited

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Nicholson, G.W.L., Canada's Nursing Sisters. Toronto: Samuel Hakkert, 1975.

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