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    Chapter 6 ‘In the Hospital + Out of the Hospital’

    Proposal review

    Nurses and Nursing in Margaret Harkness’s Periodical Publications

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    Author(s)
    Janssen, Flore
    Language
    English
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    Abstract
    In 1884, an article entitled ‘Hospital Nurses’, describing the role and responsibilities of nursing staff in hospital wards, appeared in the Leisure Hour. The author, who signed herself simply ‘M. E. H.’, was Margaret Elise Harkness, who, a few years later, would publish a series of novels on the conditions of the urban working poor under the pseudonym ‘John Law’. Harkness had been working as a professional writer, mainly for the periodical press, since 1881; prior to this she had spent several years training and working as a nurse and dispenser in various London hospitals. ‘Hospital Nurses’ describes nursing as a profession, stating: ‘Let no one imagine that this is work which all women can do.’ Nurses, Harkness explains, are marked out by their abilities, not their social class, as the work relies on cooperation and equal interaction between nurses of different class backgrounds. Although she gave up professional nursing, the voices of nurses and other medical practitioners are heard throughout Harkness’s long writing career. Nurses appear as characters and commentators in her work; but she also continued to invoke her own medical knowledge for decades after she abandoned her training. For instance, she used periodicals as platforms to give medical advice on epidemics she witnessed in Australian mining communities around the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter traces the voices of nurses as female professionals through Harkness’s contributions to periodicals from the 1880s to the beginning of the twentieth century.
    Book
    Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press
    URI
    https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/63528
    Keywords
    Healthcare, Health, Hospitals
    DOI
    10.4324/b23105-6
    ISBN
    9781032346540, 9781032346557, 9781003323204
    Publisher
    Taylor & Francis
    Publisher website
    https://taylorandfrancis.com/
    Publication date and place
    2023
    Grantor
    • University of London
    Imprint
    Routledge
    Classification
    Literature: history and criticism
    Pages
    18
    Public remark
    Funder name: Birkbeck, University of London
    Rights
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
    • Imported or submitted locally

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    License

    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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