Dr. Lydia Wytenbroek (Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing), doctoral student Ismalia De Sousa and BSN students Tamasha Hussein, Kelly Nguyen, Ariel Tzu-Han Chiao, Brandon Moeller and Merielle Moffatt varied out a Black History Month project that included a curated physical display, a virtual “walk through” of the display (recorded), and a 55 page flipbook (see below). We hope that these resources will encourage our audience to take a deep dive into the significant contributions of Black Nurses in Canada and across the world who paved the way to a better healthcare. We encourage self-reflection on how historical events and the professionalization of nursing have contributed to current health and social inequities.
Display: We organized a display in the School of Nursing (in front of the administrative offices). The display was available starting on February 4, and remained on exhibit for a couple of months.
Virtual “Walk Through” of Display: A one-hour virtual “walk-through” of the display was offered on Tuesday, February 15, 2022 from 12 – 1 pm.
Flipbook: This flipbook is part of a virtual and curated display, Black History Month 2022 – Celebrating the contributions of Black nurses to healthcare, presented and co-created by nursing students and the Consortium for Nursing History Inquiry in the UBC-V School of Nursing: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/82869
Twitter chat: Dr. Lydia Wytenbroek, Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing, and doctoral students Eunice Bawafaa and Ismalia de Sousa will chat with historians of Black history. Last week of February – date TBA.
On November 23rd, 2021 from 12:00 – 1:30 PST, the UBC Nursing History Consortium, UBC-V Nursing & BC History of Nursing Society are hosting a free online webinar, “Nursing Artifacts & Nursing Uniforms: Preserving Nurses’ Cultural History.” You can find the program and registration link for the event here: https://nursing.ubc.ca/news-events/events/04-oct-2021/nursing-artifacts-and-nurses-uniforms-preserving-nurses-cultural
Looking forward to seeing you then!
25 March 2021, online
Dr Erin Spinney reveals the history of Black nurses before Florence Nightingale in the annual History of Nursing Forum Lecture. It will take place on 25 March at 6 PM.
Nursing historians usually examine the period after Florence Nightingale and focus on the establishment of a white middle-class professional identity, like Nightingale herself.
But what about non-white nurses before Nightingale? For the annual History of Nursing Forum lecture of the Royal College of Nursing, Dr Erin Spinney discusses the employment of Black nurses in the West Indian naval hospitals of the Royal Navy in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. She considers how eighteenth-century understandings of tropical diseases contributed to Black labour in medical settings, how the Royal Navy navigated its relationship with enslavement, and the working conditions of these nurses.
Erin Spinney is a sessional lecturer at the University of Lethbridge. Her research interests focus on nursing, labour, environmental, and medical history in the long eighteenth-century British Atlantic World. She has published on eighteenth-century naval nursing and environmental history.
Please register to attend and a link will be circulated in advance with instructions on how to join the event. All tickets must be booked individually.
Talking History 2021A Series of Monthly Webinars on the History of Nursing. Join us for new, original research in the history of nursing. Nursing CEs will be given. Free for members – While free to members, donations to defray the cost of the webinar are welcome. Webinar Sessions
|
| Presenters | Topics |
| Melissa Sherrod | Meddlesome Midwifery: Institutional Racism as a Factor in Unnecessary Cesarean Deliveries |
| Eileen J.B. Thrower | “With no Words to Get Me Out”: Elizabeth Sharp and the Development of Nurse-Midwifery in Georgia |
| Charlotte Swint | Margaret Charles Smith Midwife from Eutaw, Greene County, Alabama |
March 19, 2021 11am-1pm EST
Nursing Education
Moderator: Dominique Tobbell
| Presenters | Topics |
| Carole Bennett | Negotiating the landscape of racism History in the making |
| April Matthias | Untangling Typhoid: Comparing Early 20th Century Instruction for Quality, Evidence-Based Nursing Care |
| Janet Engstrom | Physical, Intellectual, and Moral Courage: The Pioneering Work of Mary Bristow Willeford |
| Hrag David Yacoubian | From Witnessing a genocide to establishing American style nursing education and hospitals: U.S. nurses in the near east 1915-1923 |
*Note there is a fee for these panels if you are not a AAHN Member.
The Consortium for Nursing History Inquiry in the School of Nursing is holding a panel discussion for Black History Month called: Black (in)Visibility: Black Nurses in Canada Who Paved the Way. This panel will recognize the significant contributions of Black nurses to health care in British Columbia and Canada. The panel will feature a keynote address by renown historian Dr. Karen Flynn, an Associate Professor in the Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and African-American Studies Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Flynn’s book Moving Beyond Borders: A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora won the Lavinia L. Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing. The panel will also feature Dr. Lydia Wytenbroek, an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at UBC, who will discuss the importance of historical scholarship as a form of inquiry; Ismalia De Sousa, a doctoral student at UBC School of Nursing, who will be presenting initial findings of her project on the history of Black nurses and midwives in BC, and which offers a new perspective on Black women’s nursing work in the BC health care context; and Dr. Dzifa Dordunoo, President of the Coalition of African, Caribbean and Black Nurses in British Columbia and an Assistant Professor of Nursing at the University of Victoria, who will provide a concluding commentary. This panel is free and open to the public.
Register Here: https://nursing.ubc.ca/events/2021/black-nurses-who-paved-way
Notice of Special Program Event at the 2019 CSHM-CAHN Conference!
Commemorating 100-years of Academic Nursing at the University of British Columbia, 1919-2019
Group photograph of Donelda Ellis and third year UBC Nursing students at Grace Hospital
c/o UBC Archives Photograph Collection (10.14288/1.0163551)
When: June 3, 2019
Where: UBC Campus
What: 1. Pre-lunch panel, 2. Celebratory luncheon with student awards, 3. Post-lunch joint roundtable with the Canadian Historical Association
Pre-Lunch Panel Session
In 1919 UBC established Canada’s first university degree program in nursing, a virtually unheard of step, especially in the Commonwealth at large. Perhaps the new university in BC, only established in 1915, “as the last provincial university founded in Canada,” might have been flexible and open to new (public health) endeavours in ways that its well established counterparts in the core of Empire were not. Hence UBC made history with opening its doors to nursing as its first women’s education program, a choice not favoured by the BC Clubwomen for example, who rather would have preferred a program in home economics, — perceptibly a more fashionable and uplifting avenue towards academic education deemed appropriate for women. Nursing’s first director, Ethel Johns, had a seminal role in the introduction of a degree program in nursing. Her participation in influential nursing projects and research abroad brought international prestige and critical expertise to the program.
How did nursing education fare in a male-dominated university, with cultural codes of gender and class imposed upon a program that seemed to be more “pragmatically conceived than philosophically inspired?” And what is the meaning of commemorating nursing in the larger public debate over commemoration, statues and naming? A pre-lunch panel explores the wider British Columbian and Canadian context of the fledgling academic nursing program and the evolution of academic nursing. Following lunch, a joint roundtable with Canadian Historical Association will reflect on the meaning of commemoration, with a focus on the recollection of nurses in public memory.
Nursing Education at UBC starting in 1919: Forging an Academic Degree for Nurses Geertje Boschma (University of British Columbia)
Career Aspirations of B.C. Women Interested in Post-Secondary Education in the 1960s and 1970s Margaret Scaia (University of Victoria)
Panel Chair(e): Alison Phinney (University of British Columbia
Post-Lunch Interdisciplinary Session
This roundtable centers on the commemoration of nurses in public memory across a number of contexts. By critically examining representations of nurses as icons, trailblazers, war heroes, and symbols of virtue, discussants will unpack the power and meaning of the commemoration of nursing, and, more broadly, women’s caring work. In the context of current public debates on the nature – and political correctness – of historical plaques, monuments, and statues, and the broader symbolism of assigning place names, this roundtable explores the multiple uses of commemoration in and of nursing and health-related caring work. Brief presentations by five historians of medicine and nursing will be followed by discussion with the audience.
Pictures, Plaques, and Statues: The Real and False Utilities of Commemoration Jill Campbell-Miller (Carleton University)
Florence Nightingale: Defining Iconography and Monumental Challenges Sioban Nelson (University of Toronto)
Imagining and Remembering Wartime Nursing Sarah Glassford (Provincial Archives of New Brunswick)
After the Armistice: Documenting War, Commemorating Peace in Canadian Nurses’ War Memories Andrea McKenzie (York University)
Health Care Workers, Policy Makers, and Historical Memory Peter Twohig (St. Mary’s University)
Chair(e): Whitney Wood (University of Calgary)
For information on the joint CSHM – CAHN conference at Congress, visit
Canadian Association for the History of Nursing: https://cahn-achn.ca/
Canadian Society for the History of Medicine, annual conference: https://cshm-schm.ca/
For general information on Congress, visit
Call for Papers
Joint Conference: Canadian Society for the History of Medicine (CSHM) and Canadian Association for the History of Nursing (CAHN)
June 1-3, 2019
University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC
The 2019 joint meeting of the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine and the Canadian Association for the History of Nursing will take place June 1-3, 2019 at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) territory. In conjunction with the 2019 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Programme Committee calls for papers that address the theme of this year’s Congress: “Circles of Conversation.”
Scholars are invited to present research on the broadly-defined histories of medicine, healing, health, and disease that explores conversations, debates, and dialogues on these themes at the local, provincial, national, and global levels. The programme committee also welcomes papers that critically and creatively explore the relationships between historians of health and medicine and the communities they influence and are influenced by, with a particular interest in relationships between historians and Indigenous communities. Proposals on topics unrelated to the Congress theme are also welcome. Please submit an abstract of less than 350 words and one-page CV for consideration by November 30, 2018 by e-mail to Dr. Whitney Wood at whitney.wood@ucalgary.ca. The Programme Committee encourages proposals for organised panels of three (3) related papers; in this case, please submit a panel proposal of less than 350 words in addition to an abstract and one-page CV from each presenter. The Committee will notify applicants of its decision by January 30, 2019. Those who accept an invitation to present at the meeting agree to provide French and English versions of the accepted abstract for inclusion in the bilingual Programme Book.
Questions can be addressed to the Programme Committee Co-Chairs:
Dr. Margaret Scaia, University of Victoria (mrscaia@uvic.ca)
Dr. Whitney Wood, University of Calgary (whitney.wood@ucalgary.ca)
Appel de communications
Colloque conjoint de la Société canadienne d’histoire de la médecine (SCHM) et de l’Association canadienne pour l’histoire du nursing (ACHN)
Du 1erau 3 juin 2019
Université de la Colombie-Britannique
Le colloque conjoint 2019 de la Société canadienne d’histoire de la médecine et de l’Association canadienne pour l’histoire du nursing aura lieu du 1er au 3 juin 2019 à l’Université de la Colombie-Britannique, à Vancouver, en territoire xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) non cédé. Conjointement au Congrès 2019 des sciences humaines, le Comité du programme lance un appel de communications portant sur le thème du congrès de cette année, à savoir « Cercles de conversation ».
Les chercheurs sont invités à présenter des recherches sur l’histoire de la médecine, de la guérison, de la santé et de la maladie au sens large qui explorent les conversations, les débats et les dialogues sur ces thèmes à l’échelle locale, provinciale, nationale et mondiale. Le Comité du programme accueille également les communications qui explorent de façon critique et créative les relations entre les historiens de la santé et de la médecine et les communautés qu’ils influencent et qui les influencent, en prêtant un intérêt particulier aux relations entre les historiens et les communautés autochtones. Les propositions sur des sujets autres que le thème du Congrès sont également bienvenues. Veuillez soumettre un résumé de moins de 350 mots et un CV d’une page pour examen d’ici le 30 novembre 2018 par courriel à Whitney Wood, whitney.wood@ucalgary.ca. Le Comité du programme encourage également les propositions d’organisation de panels composés de trois (3) communications. Dans ce cas, veuillez soumettre une proposition de panel de moins de 350 mots, accompagnée d’un résumé et d’un CV d’une page pour chaque présentateur. Le Comité informera les candidats de sa décision d’ici le 30 janvier 2019. Ceux qui seront invités à donner une présentation s’engagent à fournir une version en anglais et en français de leur résumé accepté, qui figurera au document de programme bilingue.
Les questions peuvent être adressées aux coprésidentes du Comité du programme :
Margaret Scaia, Université de Victoria (mrscaia@uvic.ca)
Whitney Wood, Université de Calgary (whitney.wood@ucalgary.ca)
The Canadian Association for the History of Nursing/Association canadienne pour l’historie du nursing had made the 2018 Hannah Lecture available online
Please visit the link below to listen to: “To develop the ‘habit’: Nurses and prenatal care for poor women in the United States and Great Britain, c. 1880-1939” by Dr. Janet Greenlees, Senior Lecturer Social Sciences, Media & Journalism (history); Senior Director Centre for the Social History of Health & Healthcare, Glasgow, Caledonian
This audio file also includes the opening address on the history of CAHN by CAHN founder Barbara Keddy, Professor Emerita of the Dalhousie School of Nursing
Follow