Collectibles Series
Many nurses who honor and cherish our profession's history acquire artifacts and ephemera from nursing's past. These items often provide glimpses into long ago nurses or illuminate the practice of an earlier age.
Dolls, Figurines, Music Boxes
Dolls and figurines, like other media, can reflect a stereotyped the image of a nurse or be the alteration of an existing product and giving it a nurse costume. Thus this type of collectible can range between any doll or figurine in a pseudo nurse outfit, to the historically accurate Nightingale doll seen below or one of a kind dolls.
The dolls on this shelf include Childhood Days by Royal Daulton, Bing & Bing & Grondahl; Goebel, a faceless Enferma from the Dominican Republic and a Norman Rockwell design.
Throughout the country there are nursing schools with a collection of dolls in nurse costumes or in reproductions of the school uniforms through the years. These collections can be accurate or simply the product of someone's creativity.
On this shelf are dolls representing a Red Cross nurse, Florence Nightingale, a "Candy Striper" a doll from Precious Moments and a Boyd's Bear.
This "Willa" doll above is a one of a kind made by a friend of the collector, Willa Fuller, Director of Member Services and Public Relations of the Florida Nurses Association. Some doll makers strive for historical accuracy when making nurse dolls from different eras.
While music boxes are a separate collectible in themselves, those that represent nurses may become part of a nursing collection. The ones pictured below represent some typical renderings of nurses, whether in greeting cards or figurines: animals, small, fuzzy and cute, dressed as nurses and any female dressed in a white dress, cap and with a red cross somewhere.
For further information:
Karl, M. (July 2000). Ladies in white: Nurse dolls provide a cure for the collecting blues. Warman's Today's Collector, 76-77.
Return to Collectibles
Thank you [again] to Dolores Heinzmann for sharing her collection.
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