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| Program > Private Passions - Public Pursuits |
| Programme > Passions privées et intérêts publics |
| Judith
Godden (University
of Sidney) and Carol Hemstadter (Margareth Allemang Centre for the History of Nursing) Nightingale Nursing in the Colonies: Conflict in the Victorian Ideology of Class and Gender |
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The
Nightingale Fund sent only two teams of the Nightingale trained nurses to
the colonies. Lucy Osburn was the Lady Superintendent of a team sent
to the Sydney Infirmary (later Sydney Hospital), Australia in 1868, and
Maria Machin was the Lady Superintendent of the team sent to the Montreal
General Hospital in Canada in 1875. Osburn remained in Sydney for
sixteen years and is acknowledged by historians as the founder of trained
Nightingale nursing in Australia. In contrast to Osburn, Machin left
the Montreal General Hospital in 1878, not quite three years after her
arrival, taking her nurses with her. The hospital then reverted to
the old untrained nursing system and it was not until 1890 that a training
school was introduced. The verdict of Canadian historians is
unanimous that Machin was unsuccessful in her attempt to establish
reformed, trained nursing along Nightingale lines in Canada.
Nightingale’s opinion of the relative successes of Machin and Osburn,
however, was contrary to historians’ later judgements. Nightingale
and her circle in London condemned Osburn’s work in Australia as a
failure and broke off all contact with her. In contrast, Nightingale
continued to reassure Machin that her Canadian experience might not have
been the failure it seemed. Nightingale continued her warm friend
and mentor and in 1879 was to find her a position as Lady Superintendent
of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, the oldest and richest of the prestigious
London teaching hospitals. This paper addresses the key question of
why Nightingale’s assessment of Osburn’s and Machin’s attempts to
found Nightingale nursing in the colonies was so different from that of
historians. In answering this question we particularly examine the
importance of the Victorian concept of ideal womanhood, the gendered
ideology of nursing, and the way the personal lifestyles of these two Lady
Superintendents affected their professional careers. This paper draws on
extensive research in the Nightingale papers at the London Metropolitan
Archives and the British Library, the Machin Papers in the University of
Toronto archives, the Sydney Hospital archives and the Montreal General
Hospital archives.
Margareth
Allemang Centre for the History of Nursing
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