2025 Nursing History Symposium – April 14, 2025

REGISTER HERE: https://nursing.ubc.ca/community/events/2025/2025-nursing-history-symposium-save-date

ABOUT

BC NURSING HISTORY

Celebrating 35 Years Dedicated to Preserving the 

History of Nursing in BC

1990 to 2025 

Keynote speaker: Dr. Megan Davies 

The nurses of Hornby Island: Post-career Pathways

===

Panel to follow: ‘Sharing experiences of preserving our history’

Location: Cecil Green Park House

Cecil Green Park House 6251 Green Park Road: Google Maps

Time: 9:30 am – 2:00 pm 
ONLINE and IN PERSON

Registration and program info

Megan Davies: The nurses of Hornby Island: Post-career Pathways

Megan’s presentation explores the work of a group of nurses pivotal to the establishment of an early home support society on BC’s Hornby Island in the late 1970s. The Hornby Island nurses – many of them retirees – served as volunteer members of the society’s board, transcending their professional practice by engaging with a new provincial “social health” program, sometimes as health activists representing elders from their remote rural community. Yet they remained definitively nurses. Themes of nursing leadership, nursing identity, nursing practices of organization and management and shared nursing knowledge and ways of seeing shaped their work, and also this study.

Bio
Megan J. Davies is a Professor (Emerita), Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada. She is a historian of health with a regional focus on BC. She currently works on old age, madness, and everyday medicine. As part of the MadnessCanada.com community, Megan has participated in a number of academic-community collaborations, most notably the 2013 documentary, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. In January 2022, with the support of a Shadbolt Fellowship, Megan launched COVID in the House of Old, a public exhibit, website and podcast. She has numerous publications on health history.

Follow