Virtual Speaker Series
Join us for the AAHN Virtual Speaker Series! This exciting series features monthly nursing history research talks from January to June and September to December. Free for AAHN members; $30 for non-members.
April Virtual Speaker Series
Title: "The 'grey zone' for women who wore white: Jewish nursing identity during the National Socialist regime"
Speaker: Jane Brooks
Date: April 2, 2025
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 pm ET
Cost: Free for members; $30 for non-members
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.
May Virtual Speaker Series
Title: Nursing the Metropolis: the female ward staff of St Bartholomew's hospital in London, 1660-1820
Speaker: Alannah Tomkins
Date: May 2, 2025
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 pm ET
Cost: Free for members; $30 for non-members
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.
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