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Nursing is work. Laying aside for a moment the storied achievements of nursing leaders, the illustrated histories of hospitals and other health institutions, and the vocational calling which has inspired myriad romantic cultural representations, we find at the centre of nursing a core of hard, day to-day work. For the majority of the thousands of Canadian women who were and are nurses, nursing labour has borne little relation to popular conceptions of the "soothing hand on the fevered brow." Rather. it has embodied a continuing struggle by nurses to define for themselves the boundaries and conditions of their livelihood vis-avis the demands of the health industry and Canadian society as a whole.
Kathryn McPherson, in a long overdue history of Canadian nursing, begins with the assertion that nursing work and the "ordinary nurses" who perform it have gone understudied and underappreciated. Three competing models of historical inquiry -- professionalization, proletarianization, and gender -- have dominated most recent revisionist nursing history, focusing on the problem of nursing's continued subordination to capital and patriarchy. McPherson theorizes that, taken individually, these approaches do not sufficiently explain the contradictory position that nurses have held in Canadian society. It is clear, she concedes, that nurses have, as "the physician's hand," and "daughters" of the hospital, played second fiddle to the male-dominated professions of medicine and hospital administration. But as she rightly notes, "the social relations of class, gender, and ethnicity combined to create a distinctive position" of privilege for nurses in relation to many other female and male workers. (18) As individuals and in groups, nurses have on a day-to-day basis defended this privileged position, constructing and reconstructing their profession and work to resist unfair demands by the health care industry. To McPherson, the 20th century has thus seen a "transformation" of Canadian nursing, brought about in part by the agency of "ordinary nurses."
In order to make this gradual transformation more visible to the historical eye, McPherson divides her study into five "generations" of nurses which approximate chronologically the major periods in the development of Canadian health care. Disappointingly, the "first generation" of nurses, those who practised before 1900, receives only passing mention; as she notes, fragmentary evidence continues to obscure these women in history. In McPherson's analysis, then,...