Virtual Speaker Series
Join us for the AAHN Virtual Speaker Series! This exciting series features monthly nursing history research talks from January to May and September to December. Free for AAHN members; $30 for non-members.
Missed one of our Virtual Speaker Series sessions?
AAHN members can now watch them for free on our Educational Resources page (log-in required).
Not a member but interested in viewing a session? Fill out the form and let us know which one you'd like to access. Recordings are $15 each for non-members. Please note that it may take up to 72 hours to receive your recording link.
May Virtual Speaker Series
Title: Nursing the Metropolis: the female ward staff of St Bartholomew's hospital in London, 1660-1820
Speaker: Alannah Tomkins
Original Date: May 2, 2025
Brief Abstract:The history of nursing in London before the early nineteenth century used to occasion sweeping generalisations about the flaws of pre-reform nurses (if it attracted any comment at all). In contrast this investigation of the St Bartholomew's Hospital archives showcases the experiences of over 600 women who worked at Barts 1660-1820. Tracing their individual histories, both in the hospital and where possible outside it, provides illustrations of nurses' biographies, the work culture they found at the hospital, and their relationships with one another. This talk draws on material contained in chapter two of my recent book Nursing the English from Plague to Peterloo.
April Virtual Speaker Series
Title: The “Grey Zone” for Women Who Wore White: Jewish Nursing Identity During the National Socialist Regime
Speaker: Jane Brooks
Original Date: April 2, 2025
Brief Abstract: Nursing may be highly feminised profession, built around vocation and self-sacrifice, but it is a respected and respectable profession. When women choose nursing as their work, they feel valued and valuable, both in the identity they place on themselves as a nurse and that which others place on them - their position in society. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the association of the profession with dirt and intimate body care, made nursing unattractive to Jewish women. As the National Socialist regime tightened its grip on the Jews of Germany and then elsewhere in Europe, Jewish women needed work and the community needed nurses. For those Jewish women who then took up nursing, their nurse identity also enabled their survival and humanity. This talk explores the experience of Jewish nurses who engaged in nursing work in ghettos and camps. It exposes the multiple challenges they faced and the moral compromises they needed to make in order to support their co-religionists.
March Virtual Speaker Series
Title: Punishment, Forgiveness, Drunkenness, and Praise: Nurses in Council Minutes of Haslar Naval Hospital, 1755-1775
Speaker: Erin Spinney
Original Date: March 7, 2025
Brief Abstract: Nursing practice at Haslar Naval Hospital was regulated by the Royal Navy’s Sick and Hurt Board. Before 1795, when the position of hospital governor was created, on-the-ground authority was in the hands of medical practitioners through the collective governance of Physician and Council. This paper examines how Haslar’s physician and council navigated the instructions of the Sick and Hurt Board and whether these regulations were always strictly followed when disciplining nurses. Areas for discussion include the complexity of authority in nursing practice during in everyday ward-based medical care. How did nurses execute their authority in these spaces? Why did Physician and Council choose to discipline some nurses and not others despite the strictness of the regulations? Rather than the drunken, ineffective stereotype normally associated with eighteenth-century nurses, the minutes of Physician and Council show a much more complicated story of authority and nursing discipline.
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