A History of Apprenticeship Nurse Training in Ireland: Bright Faces and Neat Dresses

220 Pages·2005·3.136 MB·English

by  Gerard M. Fealy

A History of Apprenticeship Nurse
Training in Ireland
In Ireland, as in many other countries, the education and training of nurses has undergone
enormous change and has moved from what was a working apprenticeship towards a
college-based professional education. A History of Apprenticeship Nurse Training in
Ireland traces the progress of nurse education and training, presenting a new authoritative
and scholarly account of the history of the traditional system of apprenticeship nurse
training in Ireland.
Introduced as part of the reforms of hospital nursing in the late nineteenth century,
apprenticeship nurse training was a vocational extension of secondary education and a
form of paid employment for young women. It resided outside the mainstream of higher
educational provision and provided nurses with the knowledge and technical skills for
sick nursing. It also functioned to socialise them into the role of hospital worker and to
inculcate in them nursing’s value systems. This system of training provided a ready
supply of skilled, efficient, inexpensive and loyal workers. With their ‘bright faces and
neat dresses’, apprentice nurses were mostly young middle-class rural provincial women
whose training experiences had features and functions of gendered education and
gendered labour. Gerard M. Fealy exposes social, cultural, political and economic factors
that have influenced the provision and reform of nurse training, and demonstrates how
these factors have shaped modern nursing in Ireland. He also critically examines current
historiography, bringing the hidden role of nurses and nursing to the fore.
Based on extensive primary sources, this in-depth study is essential reading for
scholars and students of nursing history, women’s history, and Irish social history.
Gerard M. Fealy is a nurse historian and a senior lecturer in nursing at the School of
Nursing, Midwifery and Health Systems, University College Dublin. His research
interests include the history of nursing and curriculum policy. Dr Fealy is the editor of
Care to Remember: Nursing and Midwifery in Ireland (2005) and the co-editor of
Nursing Education in Drogheda, 1946–2004: A Commemorative History (2004).
Routledge Studies in Nursing History

A History of Apprenticeship Nurse Training in Ireland
Gerald M. Fealy
A History of Apprenticeship Nurse
Training in Ireland
Gerard M. Fealy

LONDON AND NEWYORK
First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York,
NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2006 Gerard M. Fealy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been
requested
ISBN 0-203-00795-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0-415-35997-X (Print Edition)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-35997-9 (Print Edition)
For Deirdre, Mervyn and Jonathan

Contents

List of illustrations viii
Foreword x
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction 1
1 Charity, medical relief and precursors of the modern nurse 5
2 ‘Nursing arrangements’: nursing policy in Dublin in the late nineteenth 20

century
3 Hospitals in transition: two case studies of nursing reform 39
4 ‘Exemplary conduct and character’: the lady nurses of the Dublin hospitals 61
5 Professional regulation and the General Nursing Council for Ireland 82
6 ‘Knowledge of her work’: the curriculum, c.1899–1949 99
7 The Nursing Board and the training experience, 1950–1979 117
8 From the hospital to the academy, 1980–1994 138
9 Conclusions 152

Notes 157
References 180
Index 192
List of illustrations

2.1 Nurses, Meath Hospital, Dublin, 1872 26
3.1 City of Dublin Hospital, Baggot Street, c.1900 42
3.2 New Richmond Hospital, Dublin, c.1896 53
3.3 ‘Clean and in order’, No. 1 Ward, Richmond Hospital, Dublin, 54

c.1900
3.4 Lady Superintendents of Irish Hospitals, 1904 58
4.1 Lady nurses, Jervis Street Hospital, 1895 68
4.2 ‘Ladies by birth and social position’, lady nurses of the Red 69

Cross Order, 1895
4.3 Lady nurses, St Patrick’s Home, Dublin, 1895 71
4.4 Lady nurses, Adelaide Hospital, Dublin, 1895 72
4.5 Lady nurses, South Infirmary, Cork, 1896 73
4.6 Indoor and outdoor uniform, Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital, 1895 75

(Miss Huxley is second from left)
4.7 Lady nurses, Dublin Nurses’ Training Institution, Usher’s Quay, 78

1896
4.8 Lady nurses, Mater Misericordiae Hospital, 1895 78
4.9 Lady nurses, Dr Steevens’ Hospital, Dublin 80
5.1 Nurses’ sitting room, St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, c.1910 84
5.2 Margaret Rachel Huxley, Matron, Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital, 86

Dublin
5.3 Alice Reeves, Matron, Dr Steevens’ Hospital, Dublin 89
5.4 Miss Sutton, Matron, St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin 91
6.1 Ward 12, Meath Hospital, 1900 105
6.2 ‘The more important practical training…’ St Anne’s Ward, St 106

Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin
7.1 In block, St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, 1957 125
7.2 In the practical room, St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, 1957 126
7.3 In the library, St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, 1964 128
7.4 In the nurses’ home, St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, 1964 129
7.5 The set, third-year student nurses, St. Vincent’s Hospital, 133

Dublin, 1957
7.6 First set, School of Nursing, St James’s Hospital, Dublin, 134

c.1968