I have been working with Nightingale all throughout these exercises and have grown very interested in her texts. I have now had several opportunities to look at her "Notes on Nursing" and "Notes on Matters" and would like to use these two texts in developing my final paper. Previously, I had tried to uncover her use of audience construction in these texts, but her texts contain such profound arguments and ideas about medicine of her time that I would like to turn my focus to other issues.
To find out more about the ideas and topoi of the time, in order to possibly develop a better understanding of Nightingale, I looked at a different text from the Classical Works in History of Medicine and Surgery collection, William Charles Wells' "An Account of a Female of the White Race of Mankind..."; This text, published in 1818, uses a comparison of the races to demonstrate that evolution of the human species exists, involving natural selection of the most favorable traits, or in other words, "survival of the fittest." His ideas coordinate with those of Darwin, but he came before Darwin's time. However, Darwin then published his famous ideas in the 1860s, right around the time that Nightingale wrote many of her texts. A question that came to mind was, would Nightingale support this theory of survival of the fittest, or would she be more likely to support that everyone has an equal opportunity to survive, as long as they take the proper measures necessary for good health. Would Nightingale say that we, not nature, decide our health and our survival? I thought it would be interesting to investigate how she would respond to these ideas since she was writing right in the midst of this time period.
Overall, I am still yet to uncover some of Nightingale's deeper and more significant beliefs about human health and good healthcare. Is the goal of her texts simply to pass on her knowledge in order to create a healthier society? Clearly her ideas were effective, judging by her lifespan, which was unusually long compared to others of her time (1820-1910, lived to be 90 years old). I would like to investigate all of these ideas in my final paper to find out how Nightingale's beliefs corresponded to other beliefs of the time, and to gain a better idea of why she wrote her texts in the first place.
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(I hit "post comment" before pasting in my last thought ...)
ReplyDeleteYour questions made me think of additional questions, such as: How could/did her practical solutions for hospital and surgery care transfer over into plans for the implementation of good medical care in the home or domestic environment (if it did) and was that implementation also indicative of a kind of social Darwinism? (I wonder if her piece in our anthology sheds any light into this ...?)
-Dr. Graban
Cara,
ReplyDeleteThis all sounds really interesting! That's really cool that you were able to look in other texts and get that understanding of the context of the time. I think, like you said, it's important to understand a little more about why she was writing these texts/what her goal was. I don't know anything about this collection, but a few questions I find myself wondering are where were these texts published? Who were the written for? Did the publication of these papers have an effect on healthcare at this time? Once you have a better understanding of what she intended to do, it may be easier to answer your questions concerning her views on Darwinism. Maybe she was trying to overthrow the survival of the fittest by making everyone "the fittest"! Haha. I don't know. It sounds really interesting though. Good luck!
-Merey
After Friday's class and the other additional visits I have made to the Lilly, I have advanced a lot in my research on Nightingale and my whole project in general. I am still using the same sources I mentioned above, "Notes on Nursing," "Notes on Matters," and Wells' text, but I have also examined additional sources to uncover more information. I have also been working with Nightingale's "Subsidiary Notes," the Nightingale section in our anthology, and Osler's "The Principles and Practice of Medicine." My question can kind of be broken down into three parts: 1) How did Nightingale support disease-related views of the time? 2) How did she, on the other hand, contradict the scientific theories of the time? 3) What was her overall goal in her health administration project and her texts? In summary, the question I respond to in my paper is: Considering her responses to the ideas of the time relating to health and survival, what is Nightingale's ultimate goal? I have found a lot of excerpts and ideas in the Nightingale texts I have been investigating that have provided me with what appears to be a good answer to this question. Hopefully I do a good job of articulating that answer in my paper!
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