Sylvelyn Haehner-Rombach, ed. Alltag in der Krankenpflege: Geschichte und Gegenwart / Everyday Nursing Life: Past and Present. Stuttgart Franz Steiner, 2009. 307 pp. $72.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-515-09332-3.
Sylvelyn Haehner-Rombach, ed. Alltag in der Krankenpflege:
Geschichte und Gegenwart / Everyday Nursing Life: Past
and Present.
Stuttgart Franz
Steiner, 2009. 307 pp. $72.00 (paper), ISBN
978-3-515-09332-3.
Reviewed by Aeleah Soine (Saint Mary's College of
California)
Published on H-German (October, 2012)
Commissioned by Benita Blessing
Everday Nursing in International Perspective
_Alltag in der Krankenpflege: Geschichte und Gegenwart _/
_Everyday
Nursing Life: Past and Present_ is a unique compilation
of papers
from the Second International Conference on the History
of Nursing,
which was sponsored in 2008 by the Robert Bosch
Foundation in
Stuttgart, Germany. Contributors represent leading
scholars in
German, British, and American histories of nursing but
also include a
few recognized scholars in the broader fields of German
history and
the history of medicine. As the organizer of the
conference and
editor of the book, Sylvelyn Hähner-Rombach seeks to
"provide the
opportunity for comparative studies that transcend
national
boundaries and time periods," which she further
breaks down into
three points (p. 20). First, she argues that the
German-language
historiography of nursing is moving past commemorative
and
institutional narratives of "heroes" and
events, and sees this volume
as a step toward embracing interdisciplinary and
international
analyses of broader historical nursing experiences.
Second, the
conference and the volume were designed to facilitate
cross-cultural
exchange among historians of nursing and to broaden their
audiences
by publishing the contributions in their original German
or English
with brief summations in the other language. The full
introduction
appears in both German and English. Third, the volume
focuses on the
comparative question of what nurses do on a day-to-day
basis and how
they make sense of these "everyday" experiences
in Europe and the
United States. Accomplishing any of these three goals
would be a
welcome addition to the historiography of international
nursing, but
tackling them collectively represents something even more
significant--a new direction in nursing history rooted in
international collaboration and aspiring toward a more
transnationally integrated body of scholarship relevant
not only to
nursing scholars, but historians more broadly.
The task of organizing an edited volume of conference
papers on so
broad a scale is not an easy one. Hähner-Rombach has
chosen arrange
the fifteen chapters into two sections. "The Working
Environment"
encompasses case studies of nursing work in the
community, private
homes, special care institutions, psychiatric hospitals,
and by guest
workers abroad. "Effects on Everyday Routine and the
Professional
Image" reaches behind the façade of professional
rhetoric and
idealism to explore how nurses and other health care
workers
prevented or responded to their own illnesses,
incorporated
professional procedures and personal or religious values
into their
own practices, and recognized their own value as
independent
practitioners and profit-generating professionals.
Although
thematically organized, it was refreshing to see both
sections of the
book reach back into the early nineteenth century, which
has been
less integrated into international nursing
historiographies than the
professionalization movements and war nursing of the
twentieth
century. The resulting breadth of overlapping topics makes
the
organization of the volume appear somewhat unwieldy at
the outset,
but it also seems to be evidence and justification of the
book's
purpose to move beyond heroic narrative history and
toward the
illumination of opportunities for meaningful transnational
collaboration and comparative analysis in nursing
history.
Within the two main sections of the volume, chapters
focus on
everyday nursing experiences by embedding localized case
studies
within a broader cross-cultural and/or historical
context. The
chapters are most effective when they cluster around a
similar topic
tightly enough to collectively illuminate differences
among national
or temporal contexts. For instance, the inclusion of two
chapters on
Korean guest worker nurses in West Germany adds greater
nuance to the
meaning of international nursing, but might have
collectively
contributed to the book's overall theme better if there
had been two
different cases of nurses working abroad, such as the
case of
Filipino nurses in the United States, which was raised by
both
authors as a comparative counterpoint.[1] More successful
on this
point were the chapters from Patricia D'Antonio, Carlos
Watzka, and
Sabine Braunschweig, which analyze psychiatric hospitals
and asylums
in the United States, Austria, and Switzerland during
various eras of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and comparatively
illuminate
how changing expectations of psychiatric nurses required
reconciliation of their religious values, gender, and/or
sexuality
with everyday nursing practice. By isolating one aspect
of nurses'
roles for deeper consideration, these scholars are able
to delineate
the importance of unique community values, such as Quaker
beliefs
about self-control and moral treatment, from the shared
professional
expectations of psychiatric nurses. Likewise, the focus
of the first
four chapters on community and home nursing by Karen
Nolte, Stuart
Wildman, Arlene W. Keeling, and Susanne Kreutzer could be
the core of
its own transnational and comparative study of how nurses
in the
field, freed from the hierarchical constraints of the
hospital or
institution, adopted, challenged, and reinterpreted the
ideological
impetuses of religion, charity, and patriotism in nursing
work.
The last chapter of the book, John C. Kirchgessner's
"'Krankenpflege
überschreitet Budget ... ': Eine Neubewertung der
Pflegekosten an
der Klinik der Universität von Virginia, 1945-1965
("'Nursing
Service is Over Budget ... ': A Reappraisal of the Cost
of Nursing at
the University of Virginia Hospital, 1945-1965"),
deserves singular
mention for demonstrating what might be lost without
international
exchanges such as this conference and publication. This
chapter went
beyond the expectations set by its title by embedding the
ongoing
economic undervaluation of American nursing staff into
the broader
history of hospital economics and internal gender and
labor customs.
As a German study written mainly for a German audience
but of great
importance to American scholars as well, Kirchgessner
argues,
"nurses, the providers of the care--the commodity
sold by the
hospital--continued to be economically invisible as their
work was
subsumed in the room rate and remained there throughout
the post-war
era" (p. 282). In other words, Kirchgessner's
chapter demonstrates
with an arsenal of accounting charts how nurses in the
early
twentieth century claimed to work for love not money,
which
guaranteed them professional respectability as working
women in the
short term, but also inhibited them from adapting to a
new fee
structure prompted by technological innovation and
adopted by
physicians and technicians in the long term. Given the
increasingly
contentious labor negotiations between American hospitals
and nurses'
unions, Kirchgessner's analysis is a welcome reminder
that the
economics and politics of modern nursing are more
complicated than
the time-worn Anglo-American rhetoric of Victorian female
calling,
which has dominated institutional and heroic narratives
of nursing
history and continues to inform contemporary public
discourse.
The most important contribution of the volume is its
representation
of the increasing international exchange and
collaboration of German-
and English-speaking scholars engaged in the history of
German,
British, and American nursing. Unfortunately, the
practical
challenges of transcribing and translating this
contribution for an
international readership seems to have undermined the
impact of the
original event. For H-German readers, this collection
will be of
mixed value. For those interested in the much-needed
integration of
nursing into German history, only nine of the fifteen
chapters
address nursing in German-speaking Europe, but they are
worthwhile
reading for historians of medicine, gender, and
transnationalism.
Scholars particularly interested in comparative or
transnational
history will find significant food for thought in this
book, but may
be frustrated by its lack of comparative analysis and
intellectual
synthesis within and among the chapters. Even the
introduction only
briefly addresses German scholarship related directly to
nursing,
providing neither the necessary orientation to American
and British
nursing traditions and historiographies to be useful as a
comparative
guide for nursing history, nor connection of nursing
history with
larger historiographic literatures in German, British, or
American
history.[2] For a conference publication intent upon
nurturing
comparative history and international exchange, the book
itself
reflects little of the stimulating discussion that must
have
percolated out of the paper presentations in Stuttgart.
The book
would have benefited greatly from a more detailed
introduction, some
concluding reflections on the conference discussions, or
the
self-reflexive integration of comparative themes within
the chapters.
In all, this volume has opened up new directions and
opportunities
for international exchange and comparative histories of
nursing
practice. As the field of nursing history continues to
grow, it will
surely continue to incorporate interdisciplinary
scholarship and new
methods. Hopefully, this conference will represent just
the beginning
of such collaborations as the real work of giving the
local more
global significance will come through more sustained and
focused
comparative analyses of such themes as guest worker
nurses, district
nursing, nursing care in psychiatric asylums, or the
commodification
of nursing labor
Notes
[1]. For readers interested in making such a comparison
for
themselves, see Catherine Ceniza Choy, _Empire of Care:
Nursing and
Migration in Filipino American History_ (Durham: Duke
University
Press, 2003).
[2]. See _Nursing History Review, _no. 16 (2008) for
other recent
reflections on international nursing history and examples
of German
nursing historiography in English, including an
introduction by
Sylvelyn Hähner-Rombach and Christoph Schweikardt.
Citation: Aeleah Soine. Review of Hähner-Rombach, Sylvelyn, ed.,
_Alltag in der Krankenpflege: Geschichte und Gegenwart /
Everyday
Nursing Life: Past and Present_. H-German, H-Net Reviews.
October,
2012.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United
States
License.