4 - Medical New Women I: Nurses

Summary

Late nineteenth-century technological modernity involved not only new communications and transport technologies, as seen in previous chapters, but also medical ones. Through engagements with various new material technologies and systems of knowledge, gender configurations of the time were negotiated also within the medical field. Notably, the late nineteenth century saw the emergence of female doctors and of modern nursing.

When nursing in the late nineteenth century entered the key medical institution of the hospital, the figure of the modern or ‘New Style’ Nightingale nurse took form. This entrance into the previously male-dominated grounds of science and technology was, however, not easily made. Florence Nightingale in Notes on Nursing (1859) underlines the novelty of medical knowledge being obtained – and questioned – by women: ‘It is constantly objected, – “But how can I obtain this medical knowledge? I am not a doctor. I must leave this to doctors”’ (1980: 3). A long-lasting debate started regarding the nature of nursing and what counts as authoritative knowledge, involving a discussion on the relation between (male) doctors and (female) nurses within the hospital. This was a gender complication which, as Arlene Young states, ‘would continue to influence relations between doctors and nurses and to shape the public debate over nursing for two decades’ (2008: 20). Debates on the ‘nursing question’ carried on for the remainder of the century, with the figure of the New Style nurse continually constructed and contested in the struggle for definitions and roles in the hospital institution. Importantly, these questions regarding hospital hierarchies and gendered knowledge were disputed not only in medical journals but also in public discourse and literary works.

This chapter examines literary figurations of the New Style nurse alongside accounts from nursing journals such as The Nursing Record, as interjections in the late nineteenth-century debates regarding the roles and relations of nurses and doctors. In literature of the fin de siècle the threatening disobedience of the New Style nurse is embodied in the New Woman nurse, who through her use of modern medical technologies becomes a potentially transgressive character. Through a reading of Grant Allen's Hilda Wade (1900), in which the independent nurse Hilda challenges male medical authority, the chapter explores the institutional technology of the hospital and its gendering of knowledge.