No abstract

Should the history of nursing be presented as part of medical history? Twenty years ago the answer would have been “yes.” Nurses writing about their collective past shared with physician-historians an interest in questions of professionalization, elite institutions (especially hospitals), higher education, dynamic and respected leaders, and interpretive frameworks that often affirmed the profession’s achievements. For these reasons, nursing was often treated as a subset of medicine, an important, although often less important in its own right, adjunct to the reform of the hospital and the rise of scientific medicine.

In 1998, the US Supreme Court first held that asymptomatic HIV infection constituted a disability when it ruled on the case of Bragdon v. Abbott. The use of yet another label (disabled) to identify women living with HIV has been rarely (if ever) questioned. While we do value the use of this label as an anti-discriminatory strategy, we believe that there is a need to examine how language and more specifically, the use of words such as disability, limitation, and impairment may create new forms of identities for women living with HIV. Using this legal case as a starting point, the goal of this paper is to critically examine the 'fabrication' of asymptomatic HIV infection as a disability. Grounded in a feminist poststructuralist perspective, this paper exposes the relationship between language, social institutions, subjectivity, and power in the construction of difference. By doing so, it addresses the identification of women living with HIV/AIDS as disabled and the self-differentiation process that they must go through in order to live as normally as possible.

Abstract. In October 1920, the provincial Board of Health of Ontario sent 16 public health nurses to the northern and rural parts of the province to "educate" mothers in an attempt to lower the unacceptably high infant mortality rate. This research examines the relationship between the official perceptions and actions of the Board in relation to the child welfare project and the actual experiences of the nurses in two small communities, Kenora and Bowmanville. It will be argued that knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient means to better health. The Board's focus on "health education," however delivered by the nurses, would not erase the effects of poverty, nor replace the lack of expert care for confinements or serious illness. Health education was a facile solution to the serious problem of the lack of permanent human and material resources, particularly in Northern and Eastern Ontario. Specific research at the local level is necessarqi to establish public health measures as effective agents of social change. R&um6. En octobre 1920, le <> et, de l'autre, le projet de bien-Ctre de I'enfant et les experiences vecues par les infirmi6res dans les petites collectivit6s visitkes. On se propose de montrer que les connaissances sont un moyen necessaire mais non suffisant dans la recherche de I'amelioration de la sante. La pr66minence accordke par le *Board, B Yeducation sanitaire, bien qu'elle ait et6 actualisee de manikre creative par les infirmi&res, n'a pas suffi, cependant, pour combattre les effets de la hauvretk ou pour B l'insuffisance de soins comvetents dans les cas d'accouchement et de maladie grave. L'education sanitair; s'est av6r6e n16tre qu'une solution superficielle au problkme grave du manque endemique de ressources humaines et materielles,

Over nearly four decades (1911-1947) ICN established itself as an enduring organization for nurses in the midst of turbulent international politics, pressing healthcare demands and hardships of war. As women, ICN leaders had devoted themselves to their mission to improve the cause of nursing, economically, professionally and culturally. In the process the unifying missionary spirit of the early leaders underwent important transformations. In part, because of tensions resulting from diverse views from within, but most of all because of external influences of profound social change and the upheaval of war, the postwar identity of ICN was different.