ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

White Aprons in Dirty Wars: Women, Medicine, and Colonial Violence at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

• In Event: Women Healers: Nursing in the Early 20th Century

English Abstract

Where does the field of medicine end and the field of battle begin? This paper responds to this question by considering the experiences of British women who worked as military nurses during Britain’s turn of the century colonial wars in Egypt, Sudan, and South Africa before they later went on to serve in (and sometimes direct) Britain’s military nursing services in the First World War. Current historiographical and popular understandings of the history of military nursing in Britain focus on the Crimean War and the First World War as key moments in the development of the profession. But this story has a longer, global history in Britain’s late nineteenth century colonial conflicts; so-called “small wars,” which were in fact defined by racist colonial violence, civilian concentration, and colonial expansion.

Nursing professionals and early pioneers in the field found themselves complicit in colonial violence in the course of their work as they practiced medicine in colonial settings. Like other “imperial careerists” and colonial agents, their examples demonstrate how even projects of care could support broader political projects of conquest and domination. I use personal papers and private photograph albums produced by nurses themselves, including one that documents the experience of nursing inside a concentration camp in the South African War, to argue for a need to pluralize our understanding of colonial medicine. By bringing historiographical insights from the fields of post-colonial and British history together with the history of science, we can work to refocus our understanding of what nursing, and the field of medicine more broadly, meant in the context of colonial war.

Author

• Taylor Soja, Illinois State University