Do you love historical research and wish you could read more?
Check out the 1-hour reads at Hourly History. A short biography of Florence Nightingale is among their reads. You can also sign up for free e-reads.
And remember…nursing & health history never happened (or happen) in a vacuum. Understanding the larger political, medical, geographical, adventurer, ideological, musical, art, philosophical, religious, cultural history (milieu) of any era is important, and these books can give quick insights. For example, Crimean or British leadership during Nightingale’s time will help you understand her and her contributions.
Check out one or more of these books, and let me know what you think. -DrH
Disclaimer: I have no financial or other interest in the Hourly History site or the books it promotes; and I cannot speak to their historical quality.
Below is a YouTube recording of this week’s presentation from the Midwest Nursing History Research Center. The author presents an overview of her book and where you can learn more.
Oral history is a field of study and a method of gathering, preserving and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events. Oral history is both the oldest type of historical inquiry, predating the written word, and one of the most modern, initiated with tape recorders in the 1940s and now using 21st-century digital technologies.
In Doing Oral History, Donald Ritchie explains, “Oral History collects memories and personal commentaries of historical significance through recorded interviews. An oral history interview generally consists of a well-prepared interviewer questioning an interviewee and recording their exchange in audio or video format. Recordings of the interview are transcribed, summarized, or indexed and then placed in a library or archives. These interviews may be used for research or excerpted in a publication, radio or video documentary, museum exhibition, dramatization or other form of public presentation. Recordings, transcripts, catalogs, photographs and related documentary materials can also be posted on the Internet.“ Oral history does not include random taping, such as President Richard Nixon’s surreptitious recording of his White House conversations, nor does it refer to recorded speeches, wiretapping, personal diaries on tape, or other sound recordings that lack the dialogue between interviewer and interviewee.”
For thought: Whom within your circle could contribute to our healthcare history? What a wonderful contribution if you could collect their oral history using resources from the Oral History Association and elsewhere!!
Dr. Guian McKee will speak about his new book, Hospital City, Health Care Nation, which recasts the story of the U.S. health care system by emphasizing its economic, social, and medical importance in American communities. Focusing on urban hospitals and academic medical centers, the book argues that the country’s high level of health care spending has allowed such institutions to become vital economic anchors for communities. Yet that spending has also constrained possibilities for comprehensive health care reform over many decades. At the same time, the role of hospitals in urban renewal, in community health provision, and as employers of low-wage workers has contributed directly to racial health disparities. McKee points to the increased role of financial capital after the 1960s in shaping not only hospital growth but also the underlying character of these vital institutions. The book shows how hospitals’ quest for capital has interacted with structural racism and inequality to constrain the U.S. health care system. Dr. McKee is a professor of presidential studies at the UVA Miller Center. He is co-chair of the Presidential Recordings Program and co-directs its Health Care Policy Project. His 2023 book, Hospital City, Health Care Nation, is available through the University of Pennsylvania Press. We hope you can tune in! Maura Singleton Center Manager Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry
Speaker:Arleen Tuchman, PhD, Vanderbilt University
Date and Time:Wednesday, April 6, 2022, 4:00pm EDT, virtual BlueJeans event
Abstract:Who is considered most at risk for diabetes, and why? In this talk, Tuchman discusses how, at different times over the past one hundred years, Jews, Native Americans, and African Americans have been labeled most at risk for developing diabetes, and that such claims have reflected and perpetuated troubling assumptions about race, ethnicity, and class. As Tuchman shows, diabetes also underwent a mid-century transformation in the public’s eye from being a disease of wealth and “civilization” to one of poverty and “primitive” populations. In tracing this cultural history, Tuchman argues that shifting understandings of diabetes reveal just as much about scientific and medical beliefs as they do about the cultural, racial, and economic milieus of their time.
Bio:Arleen Tuchman is a specialist in the history of medicine in the United States and Europe, with research interests in the cultural history of health, disease, and addiction; the rise of scientific medicine; and scientific and medical constructions of gender and sexuality. She is the author of three books, the most recent being Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (Yale University Press, 2020). She is currently working on a history of addiction and the family in the United States.
Tuchman has held many fellowships, including ones from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Tuchman is a past director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society (2006-2009) and has, since 2019, been the co-creator of a historic medicinal garden on Vanderbilt University’s campus
It is original history that holds lessons for nurses today.What is it that we learn from the women, whose stories are within this book?
I think it’s mainly this: “Do not let your personal limitations stop you from doing the good that you see to do in the world.”
This book contains the previously untold story of how a remarkable set of lay and professional nurses shaped Church of Christ (COC) missions in southeastern Nigeria. No archive of their work existed, and I enjoyed the privilege of compiling the story from the memories, bags, basements, and boxes of the women who lived this story and those who knew them. The book was 10 years in the making.
Missionary student technical nurse learning to give injection (ca 1966). Private collection with permission.
These women’s decisions and actions occurred within a broader shift of COC perspectives away from missionary healthcare as incidental volunteer women’s work, and toward healthcare missions as a Christian duty. For each being a missionary nurse meant delivering healthcare as part of Christian evangelism. To that end they executed multiple roles: healer, educator, revolutionary, advocate, good-will ambassador, protector, administrator, evangelist, role model, fund-raiser, friend, and colleague. We did “everything that needed to be done that there was nobody to do,” reflected missionary Nancy Petty RN.
Enjoy the read, and pursue the good that you can do in this world.
[Featured image: August 23, 1965. The Nigerian Christian Hospital Outpatient Clinic opens. Photographer JR Morgan. Used with permission from JRM private collection]
“History provides current nurses with the same intellectual and political tools that determined nursing pioneers applied to shape nursing values and beliefs to the social context of their times. Nursing history is not an ornament to be displayed on anniversary days, nor does it consist of only happy stories to be recalled and retold on special occasions. Nursing history is a vivid testimony, meant to incite, instruct, and inspire today’s nurses as they bravely tread the winding path of a reinvented health care system.” (American Association for History of Nursing)
We need nurse historians–those researchers who can help us understand the present and future by examining the past!
MY PROJECT just published (amazon/apple books/kindle): A Time to Heal: Missionary Nurses in Churches of Christ, Southeastern Nigeria (1953-1967). I like to think of the work as accessible history told from the point of view of those who lived it. A take-away for me from their story is: Don’t let your current inexperience or limited knowledge stop you from doing the good you see to do.
You can be a part of documenting such stories, including your own. Can I pique your interest with these examples about historical research?
1. Artifacts:Example = http://acif.org/The American Collectors of Infant Feeders:
CREDIT http://acif.org/
The American Collectors of Infant Feeders is a non-profit organization whose primary purpose is to gather and publish information pertaining to the feeding of infants throughout history. The collecting of infant feeders and related items is promoted.
2. Interviews:Example = http://www.oralhistory.org/ Want to do interviews of interesting faculty, students, leaders, “ordinary” nurses? Check out the Oral History Association In addition to fostering communication among its members, the OHA encourages standards of excellence in the collection, preservation, dissemination and uses of oral testimony.
3. Stories from the “ordinary:” Example: http://www.murphsplace.com/mother/main.htmlMy Mother’s War – “Helen T.Burrey was an American nurse who served as a Red Cross Nurse during World War I. She documented her experience in both a journal and a scrapbook which has been treasured by her daughter, Mary Murphy. Ms Murphy has placed many of these items on the Internet for people to access and it provides a first-hand account of that experience. Additionally she has a variety of links to other WWI resources.” (quoted from AAHN Resources online)
CREDIT http://e-anca.org/
4. Ethnic studies:Example=https://libguides.rowan.edu/blacknurses Black Nurses in History “This is a ‘bibliography and guide to web resources’ from the UMDNJ and Coriell Research Library. Included are Mamie O. Hail, Mary Eliza Mahoney, Jessie Sleet Scales, Mary Seacole, Mabel Keaton Staupers, Susie King Taylor, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman.” (quoted from AAHN Resources online)
Critical thinking: Don’t forget to save your own materials. Your life is history! What in your life is most interesting? Have you written it down or dictated it into your iphone voice memo? There is GREAT interest in “ordinary” men and women. Many times items are tossed because they are “just letters” or “only old records,” or “stuff.” Just Don’t Do It.
Discovering Your Inner Scientist 