I was so excited to take part in Nursing Clio’s ‘Beyond Florence’ series! The goal of the ‘Beyond Florence’ series was to examine nursing history beyond Florence Nightingale in 2020 the Year of the Nurse and Midwife. As Dr. Kylie Smith states in the series introductory post “to focus only on Florence, or to claim her as the most important nurse of all time, hides the contribution of other types of nurses, and nursing care, and it reinforces the white, Anglocentric view of what it means to be a nurse.”
My piece “Black Before Florence: Black Nurses, Enslaved Labor, and the British Royal Navy, 1790-1820,” considers the work of Black nurses in West Indian British Naval Hospitals.
Check out all the ‘Beyond Florence’ articles here.
Comments are closed