This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores, in different ways, the central tension in clinical nursing practice between 'cure' and 'care'. It examines issues such as the clinical challenges of nursing chronically sick or severely injured patients and the ethical problems that nurses encountered in implementing sometimes experimental medical treatments. The book provides a case study of the development of a modern infant's hospital. It shows how the institution of an infant nursing in Dresden, with a particular focus on the health of the child, provided a model for developments in nursing elsewhere in Germany. The book describes the experience of patients with that of nurses. It presents a powerful narrative of the work of nurses with children damaged by the 1958 fire at a Chicago school, Our Lady of the Angels (OLA).
The sanatorium patient and sanatorium nursing, c. 1908–52
Martin S. McNamara and Gerard M. Fealy
This chapter offers a somewhat oblique perspective on nursing practice. With a focus on 'the life of a consumptive' in early twentieth-century Ireland, the chapter examines the experiences of the sanatorium patient as told by individual patients themselves and by nurses and physicians writing in the professional press of the period. In the first half of the twentieth century, pulmonary tuberculosis was one of the major causes of death in Ireland. The architectural form of the mid-twentieth century sanatorium ward, with its veranda and its spaces for the treatment and care for each patient, reveals conceptualisations and unfolding discursive formations of tuberculosis in the period. The introduction of the BCG vaccine and anti-tuberculosis drug therapy in the early 1950s quickly and radically altered the whole landscape of treatment and care, resulting in the demise of the sanatorium and the sanatorium nurse.
This book explores how skilled nursing practice develop to become an essential part of the modern health system. It traces the history and development of nursing practice in Europe and North America. The book explores two broad categories of nursing work: the 'hands-on' clinical work of nurses in hospitals and the work of nurses in public health, which involved health screening, health education and public health crisis management. Until the end of the eighteenth century sick children were, for the most part, cared for at home and, if admitted to hospital, were cared for alongside adults. Around 1900 the baby wards of the children's hospitals had a poor reputation because of their high mortality rates due to poor hygiene, malnutrition and insufficient knowledge of child and infant healthcare . The book relates particular experiences of Australian and New Zealand nurses during World War I, With a focus on 'the life of a consumptive' in early twentieth-century Ireland, it examine the experiences of the sanatorium patient. sanatorium nursing. As sanatoria became a special division of public health, sanatorium nursing developed as a branch of nursing distinct from other branches. An analysis of public health and nursing issues during the cholera epidemic shows the changes in the city's health administration and the nursing system after the epidemic. The nurses' work with schoolchildren, coal miners and migrant workers is also examined against the backdrop of economic, social, political, racial and healthcare forces.