Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the UBC School of Nursing and the Consortium for Nursing History Inquiry. With only a brief training and minimal hospital experience, the VADs entered the unfamiliar world of the military hospital to work alongside the qualified Canadian military nurses at home, and British military nurses overseas, performing tasks that ranged from scrubbing floors and cleaning bedpans, to applying dressings and foments, and even assisting in the operating theatres. In this discussion Linda Quiney examines the boundaries that defined the VADs’ place at the bedside, the contested space of the wartime hospital wards, and the challenges they presented to the authority of the nursing professionals.
Linda Quiney is a historian. She has taught health history courses at the Department of History at UBC and is affiliate member of the Consortium for Nursing History Inquiry at the UBC School of Nursing. Currently she is working on a book on Canadian Women as Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurses during and after World Ward One.
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Quiney, L. J. (1998). “Sharing the halo”: Social and professional tensions in the work of world war I Canadian volunteer nurses. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 9(1), 105-124. doi:10.7202/030494ar. [Link]
Quiney, L. J. (2002). “Filling the gaps”: Canadian voluntary nurses, the 1917 Halifax explosion, and the influenza epidemic of 1918. Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 19(2), 351. [Link]
Quiney, L. J. (1998). Assistant angels: Canadian voluntary aid detachment nurses in the great war. Canadian Bulletin of Medical History = Bulletin Canadien d’Histoire De La Médecine, 15(1), 189. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides