First World War Nursing

In this lucid and cogently-argued book, Christine Hallett explores the nature of the practices developed by nurses and their volunteer-assistants during the First World War. She argues that nurses found meaning in their complex and stressful work by identifying it as a process of "containing trauma." Broad in its scope and detailed in its research, the book analyzes the work of nurses from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and the United States of America. It draws on highly personal writings: letters and diaries drawn from archives and libraries throughout the world. This wide-ranging book explores a range of treatment scenarios, from the Western and Eastern fronts to the Eastern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and India. It considers both the efforts of nurses to provide physical, emotional, and moral containment to their patients, and the work they did to maintain their own physical and emotional integrity.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The First World War was the first ‘total war’. Its industrial weaponry damaged millions of men and drove whole armies underground into dangerously unhealthy trenches. Many were killed. Many more suffered terrible, life-threatening injuries: wound infections such as gas gangrene and tetanus, exposure to extremes of temperature, emotional trauma and systemic disease. In an effort to alleviate this suffering, tens of thousands of women volunteered to serve as nurses. Of these, some were experienced professionals, while others had undergone only minimal training. But regardless of their preparation, they would all gain a unique understanding of the conditions of industrial warfare. Until recently their contributions, both to the saving of lives and to our understanding of warfare, have remained largely hidden from view. By combining biographical research with textual analysis, Nurse writers of the great war opens a window onto their insights into the nature of nursing and the impact of warfare.

This book brings together a collection of works by scholars who have produced some of the most innovative and influential work on the topic of First World War nursing in the last ten years. The contributors employ an interdisciplinary collaborative approach that takes into account multiple facets of Allied wartime nursing: historical contexts (history of the profession, recruitment, teaching, different national socio-political contexts), popular cultural stereotypes (in propaganda, popular culture) and longstanding gender norms (woman-as-nurturer). They draw on a wide range of hitherto neglected historical sources, including diaries, novels, letters and material culture. The result is a fully-rounded new study of nurses’ unique and compelling perspectives on the unprecedented experiences of the First World War.

Offers a compelling account of nurses' wartime experiences and a clear appraisal of their work and its contribution to the allied cause between 1914 and 1918, on both the Western and the Eastern Fronts.

In Sister Soldiers of the Great War, award-winning author Cynthia Toman recovers the long-lost history of Canada’s first women soldiers – nursing sisters who enlisted as officers with the Canadian Army Medical Corps. The nursing sisters had a mandate to salvage as many sick and wounded men as possible for return to the front lines. Nothing prepared them, however, for the poor living conditions, the scale of the casualties, or the type of wounds they encountered. But their letters and diaries reveal that they were determined to soldier on under all circumstances while still “living as well as possible.”

During the Second World War, more than 4,000 civilian nurses enlisted as Nursing Sisters, a specially created all-female officers' rank of the Canadian Armed Forces. They served in all three armed force branches and all the major theatres of war, yet nursing as a form of war work has long been under-explored. An Officer and a Lady fills that gap. Cynthia Toman analyzes how gender, war, and medical technology intersected to create a legitimate role for women in the masculine environment of the military and explores the incongruous expectations placed on military nurses as "officers and ladies."

The evocative diaries of a young nurse stationed in northern France during the First World War, published for the first time. A rare insight into the great war for fans of CALL THE MIDWIFE. In April 1915, Dorothea Crewdson, a newly trained Red Cross nurse, and her best friend Christie, received instructions to leave for Le Tréport in northern France. Filled with excitement at the prospect of her first paid job, Dorothea began writing a diary. 'Who knows how long we shall really be out here? Seems a good chance from all reports of the campaigns being ended before winter but all is uncertain.' Dorothea would go on to witness and record some of the worst tragedy of the First World War at first hand, though somehow always maintaining her optimism, curiosity and high spirits throughout. The pages of her diaries sparkle with warmth and humour as she describes the day-to-day realities and frustrations of nursing near the frontline of the battlefields, or the pleasure of a beautiful sunset, or a trip 'joy-riding' in the French countryside on one of her precious days off. One day she might be gossiping about her fellow nurses, or confessing to writing her diary while on shift on the ward, or illustrating the scene of the tents collapsing around them on a windy night in one of her vivid sketches. In another entry she describes picking shells out of the beds on the ward after a terrifying air raid (winning a medal for her bravery in the process). Nearly a hundred years on, what shines out above all from the pages of these extraordinarily evocative diaries is a courageous, spirited, compassionate young woman, whose story is made all the more poignant by her tragically premature death at the end of the war just before she was due to return home.