HIST2377 History Of Nursing
Question:
Choose two chapters from Kathryn McPherson, Bedside Matters, our textbook for this course (any two of your choice, ie. chapters two and three, five and six. It might be better to choose two chapters that deal with a somewhat similar topic so that you are not comparing/contrasting “apples and oranges”).
Present a critical analysis of these two chapters: do the chapters appear to present a true picture of the era in nursing history that they cover?
Your thesis for this paper could be something like: “Chapters Two and Three of Kathryn McPherson’s Bedside Matters present an effective portrayal of X period in nursing history for X reasons.”
When analyzing the chapters, you might also consider questions like:
what kinds of primary and secondary sources did McPherson use?
Were they effective in making her argument? What kinds of words/language did McPherson use in presenting her argument (i.e. longer words, words that were difficult to follow of understand)?
How did McPherson’s diction/word choice influence her argument?
Did one of the chapters appear to present a stronger argument than the other one?
Why did one chapter’s argument appear to be stronger?
Answer:
Introduction
McPherson Kathryn explores the nursing history in Canada and the world as a whole. In her book, she analyses the changes that have taken place in the nursing professions. She explores the changes in terms of gender, pays, education, working conditions, class, among other perspectives. By looking at the changes that have taken place in these aspects of life, she has been able to re-examine the nursing history. The book draws the attention of the readers to the struggles that nurses have gone through since the start of the profession in the late 19th century, where nurses were seen as domestic workers to the present where the nursing profession occupies a core position in the health sector. In this essay, I am going to compare and contrast the first and second chapters of the book ‘Bedside Matters.’
Comparison and contrast of chapter one and two
Chapter one of the book highlights the social battles that nurses fought to be recognized as professionals while the second chapter talks about the professional journey of the current nursing, which started with the introduction of nursing schools. For a long time, nursing had been associated with females. Those in the profession had been forced to play the wifely roles for the doctors and maternal role for the patients. Worse still, the chapter explains that in the past, the profession was left for those girls who did not marry. Those who married left the profession (Kanji et al.,2014). The chapter is on social discrimination that existed in the health sector, where the nurses’ role was not appreciated. Mcpherson explains that only whites of European origin and native Canadians were allowed into the nursing profession and more sore allowed to attend to white patients. The discrimination was not because nursing was viewed as a prestigious profession. Still, it was because immigrants and people of other races were seen as incapable of offering proper patient care. In the 19th century, racism was on its peak, and nursing provided a platform to extend the instances of racism (Mcpherson, 2013).
Chapter two, on the other hand, involves the challenges that nurses faced in moving away from domestic workers to professional nurses. Mcpherson uses the name ‘first-generation nurses’ to refer to the first nurses to receive formal training. Hospitals were moving away from seeking the services of untrained women to starting up training schools for young women (Scaia, 2017). As the author mentions, Nova Scotia Hospital was one of the first hospitals to start offering training for young nurses. From the late 19th century to the early 20th century when the role of the nurses in healthcare begun to receive recognition. The second chapter highlights the developments in the nursing profession. It also acknowledges the challenges that faced those young nurses who were first to receive formal training into becoming nurses (Haney, 2014).
Although there were significant strides in the growth of the nursing profession, the student nurses still faced a lot of challenges. Those who were recruited were expected to work for free for two years in exchange for the training. After enrolling as a nurse, the nurses were expected to take up any tasks given to them. The first qualification for training as a nurse was being female (Bates, 2010). The profession was still considered feminine, and most of the training involved teaching young women to take up the sexual responsibility of the women. Among the roles taught in nursing school included cooking and feeding the patients.
Even after training, the nurses received relatively low pay. The author notes that the superior nurses received less than half of the salaries paid to the medical practitioners who were mainly males. Gender insubordinations still existed in the 19th century. The author uses a narrative tone to catch the attention of the readers and draw their attention to the injustices in nursing history (Flynn, 2018).
The similarity in the first and second chapters is evident in the fact that gender discrimination persisted through time. Around 1912, there were changes where males started taking up jobs as nurses. That was a positive move where nursing was no longer associated with females but was treated as an essential profession in the health sector. Even with changes that saw nursing become an all-inclusive career there were problems that persisted throughout time. The male nurses still received more pay than their female counterparts. However, the argument on discrimination is more evident in the first chapter than in the second one. In the first chapter, the author thoroughly explores the instances of discrimination that existed in the late 19th century. In the second chapter, the topic of discrimination has not been emphasized. The emphasis is on the developments that had taken place in setting up nursing training schools (Lacovetta and Carstairs, 2013).
Chapter one presented nursing during the era when only whites of European origin and native Canadians were allowed to practice nursing and attend to white patients, while chapter two presented a period that was marked by the massive civilization of the nursing profession where people of all races were allowed into the profession. In both chapters, the author uses medical records as primary sources of information and other people’s publications as secondary sources of information to successfully bring out the nursing history (Twohig, 2018).
Conclusion
In conclusion, Mcpherson chronologically narrates the events in nursing history that marked the development of the current nursing profession. Between the first and the second chapter, there is a transition from an age when nurses were viewed as domestic workers and received no formal education to the age where hospitals set up nursing training schools and nurses were treated like professionals. However, there are also aspects such as gender discrimination that have existed through the periods presented in the two chapters. This paper has, therefore, compared and contrasted the two chapters in relation to their content and presentation by the author.
References
Bates, C. (2010). Looking closely: Material and visual approaches to the nurse’s uniform. Nursing History Review, 18, 167.
Flynn, K. (2018). “Hotel Refuses Negro Nurse”: Gloria Clarke Baylis and the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 35(2), 278-308.
Haney, C. (2014). Towards Legitimate Nursing Work? Historical Discursive Constructions of Abortion in the Canadian Nurse, 1950–1965. Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 31(2), 93-115.
Iacovetta, F., & Carstairs, C. (2013). The Pleasures and Perils of Feminist Tributes—Canada. Journal of Women’s History, 25(4), 212-223.
Kanji, Z., Ladhani, Z. S., & Dhamani, K. A. (2014). Nurses. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Health, Illness, Behavior, and Society, 1692-1697.
McPherson, K. (2003). Bedside Matters: The Transformation of Canadian Nursing, 1900-1990. University of Toronto Press.
Scaia, M. (2017). Becoming a Nurse in Vancouver and Calgary: Women, Work, Motherhood, 1958 to 1976. BC Studies, (194), 91.
Twohig, P. L. (2018). The Second “Great Transformation”: Renegotiating Nursing Practice in Ontario, 1945–70. Canadian Historical Review, 99(2), 169-195.
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