Woman's Mission and Professional Knowledge: Nightingale Nursing in Colonial Australia and Canada

Nineteenth-Century Nurses and Midwives in Three Canadian Cities, 1861–1891

“…It was to this organization that the Board of the Montreal General Hospital (MGH), urged by the medical staff, appealed in 1874 for nurses. 70 The team sent by the fund included Maria Machin, as supervisor, and nine working-class nurses, all Nightingale trained. Not all of these nurses proved satisfactory, a reflection of early difficulties in attracting suitable trainees, but, over the next three years, Machin did improve nursing at the MGH though was unable to get a school established.…”

‘A model for the country’: letters from Florence Nightingale to the architect, Thomas Worthington, on hospitals and other matters 1865–1868

“…Nightingale had been advising the government of New South Wales since 1866 on the organisation of hospital services in Sydney 21. In 1868, the Nightingale Fund Council sent out five nurses under the care and authority of Lady Superintendent, Lucy Osburn, to the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary (later Sydney Hospital).…”

A duras penas: estratégias, conquistas e desafios da enfermagem em escala mundial

“…One powerful sign of this resistance to the power exerted by physicians over 'carers', who already far outnumbered their male counterparts, was the creation of the Royal British Nurses' Association in 1887 under the leadership of Ethel Bedford-Fenwick, who brooked the "strenuous opposition" of the Hospitals Association and Florence Nightingale (Davies, 1983, p.55). Florence defended the need for young candidates to have a 'vocation' -a facet of professionalism that spread beyond the North and South Atlantic, reaching colonial Australia in the Pacific, and finally Korea and Japan in the early twentieth century (Godden, Helmstadter, 2004;Takahashi, 2002). Judith Godden and Carol Helmstadter (2004) raise the controversial point that "the concept of the woman's mission undermined the equally important concept of nurses ' professional training," (p.157).…”

“…Florence defended the need for young candidates to have a 'vocation' -a facet of professionalism that spread beyond the North and South Atlantic, reaching colonial Australia in the Pacific, and finally Korea and Japan in the early twentieth century (Godden, Helmstadter, 2004;Takahashi, 2002). Judith Godden and Carol Helmstadter (2004) raise the controversial point that "the concept of the woman's mission undermined the equally important concept of nurses ' professional training," (p.157). They go on to say that, 'missionaries' or not, these nurses had clinical knowledge that was highly effective "in the newly medicalized hospitals" (p.164), and that the Nightingale-inspired supervisors in many parts of the world -such as Lucy Osburn, appointed Lady Superintendent at Sydney Hospital in 1868 -"were a major challenge to the patriarchal structure of the hospital," (p.166).…”

“…On the intellectual plane, it is surprising and regrettable how little overlap there is between Latin American literature on nursing and the excellent output of American, British, Canadian and French historiographers. 17 Comparative historical analysis, one of the strengths of American, French and British academics (such as Davies, 1983;Feroni, Kober, Sept. 1995;Rafferty, 1995;Godden, Helmstadter, 2004) is precisely one of the weaknesses of their Latin American counterparts. The powerful political and intellectual activism of nursing in Latin America currently seems not to appreciate that the 'radical' policy of international leaders started at the large-scale meetings of the International Council of Nurses, such as the one held in Copenhagen in 1922, whose organization has been based on feminist and socialist proposals ever since (Rafferty, 1995, p.277, 281).…”