Psychiatry's 'Others'? Rethinking the Professional Self-Fashioning of British Mental Nurses c.  1900-20.

This article draws upon a corpus of previously unattributed contributions to the Asylum News (1897-1919) - one of the first journals produced for the edification of asylum workers - to illustrate the diversity of medical personae developed and disseminated by these employees in the Edwardian era. Through scientific and creative works, nurses engaged with the pressing social and medical debates of the day, in the process exposing a heterogeneous intellectual culture. Moreover, as their writings attest, for some ambitious nurses these pretensions to intellectual authority prompted claims for medical autonomy, driving agitation on the hospital wards. The article thus strengthens claims for the 'cultural agency' of asylum workers and offers new insights into the cultural antecedents of professionalisation and trade unionism.
PMID: 31208481 [PubMed - in process]

Source: Medical History - June 19, 2019 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Neuendorf M Tags: Med Hist Source Type: research