Charles Rosenberg, Harvard University

*Co-hosted with Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing

Making Good on Private Duty. What we can Learn from Late Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Guides to Domestic Practice.

In an era before hospitalization for severe illness became routine, the management of illness was an aspect of anticipated domestic responsibility. The first generations of trained nurses assumed that most would work in homes as well as hospitals and responsible wives and mothers assumed that care of the sick might well be part of their domestic routine. Not surprisingly, a genre of manuals was developed to guide such responsibilities. This talk will focus on these manuals and the etiological, attitudinal, therapeutic and cultural assumptions they reveal.