1st Edition

First World War Nursing New Perspectives

Edited By Alison S. Fell, Christine E. Hallett Copyright 2013
    216 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    238 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This book brings together a collection of works by scholars who have produced some of the most innovative and influential work on the topic of First World War nursing in the last ten years. The contributors employ an interdisciplinary collaborative approach that takes into account multiple facets of Allied wartime nursing: historical contexts (history of the profession, recruitment, teaching, different national socio-political contexts), popular cultural stereotypes (in propaganda, popular culture) and longstanding gender norms (woman-as-nurturer). They draw on a wide range of hitherto neglected historical sources, including diaries, novels, letters and material culture. The result is a fully-rounded new study of nurses’ unique and compelling perspectives on the unprecedented experiences of the First World War. 

    Introduction: New Perspectives on First World War Nursing  Christine E. Hallett and Alison S. Fell  Part 1: National Identities  1. Making Sister Julie: The Origin of First World War French Nursing Heroines in Franco-Prussian War Stories  Margaret H. Darrow  2. "Beacons of Britishness": British Nurses and Female Doctors as Prisoners of War  Angela K. Smith  3. "I Begin to Feel as a Normal Being Should, In Spite of the Blood and Anguish in Which I Move": American Women’s First World War Nursing Memoirs  Jane Potter  Part 2: Professional Identities  4. "All for the Boys": The Nurse-Patient Relationship of Australian Army Nurses in the First World War  Kirsty Harris  5. "Emotional Nursing": Involvement, Engagement and Detachment in the Writings of First World War Nurses and VADs  Christine E. Hallett  6. A Sister’s War: The Diaries of Alice Slythe  Janet Watson  Part 3: Nurse as Witness  7. Negotiating injury and masculinity in First World War Nurses’ Writing  Carol Acton  8. The Theatre of Pain: Observing Mary Borden in The Forbidden Zone  Hazel Hutchison  9. Cubist Vision in Nursing Accounts  Margaret R. Higonnet  Afterword: Remembering the First World War Nurse in Britain and France  Alison S. Fell

    Biography

    Alison S. Fell is Professor of French Cultural History at the University of Leeds. She has published widely on French and British women and the First World War, including two edited volumes: (with Ingrid Sharp) The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives 1914-1919 (Palgrave, 2007) and Les Femmes face à la guerre (Peter Lang, 2009). She is currently completing a monograph, Back to the Front: Women as Veterans in France and Britain, 1916-33, and is leading an AHRC-funded research project entitled “Legacies of War 1914-18/2014-18.”

    Christine E. Hallett is Professor of Nursing History at the University of Manchester, UK. She is Chair of the UK Association for the History of Nursing and was Founding Chair of the European Association for the History of Nursing. Professor Hallett holds Fellowships of the Royal Society of Medicine, UK and the Royal Society for the Arts, UK. Her publications include the critically-acclaimed monograph, Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War (Manchester University Press, 2009) and the popular Celebrating Nurses: A Visual History (Fil Rouge Press, 2010).