Reviewer: Alain Touwaide, PhD (Ronin Institute)
Description: Writings by nurses, here in the form of memoirs, are understudied in medical history. They constitute a genre that may cross the boundaries of traditionally defined genres, being located between oral history, case studies, autobiography, or survey. The present analysis takes into consideration 14 of such writings, in German, French, and English, dating back to the time of the First World War.
Purpose: As the author puts it, this is a history of "the changes in the place of nursing within the medical profession during the decades that preceded and followed the Great War." Going beyond, however, the book is about a "transgression": women being involved in war in a transgressive crossing of gender boundaries that defined roles and loci, with women fundamentally at home and not on the front, and certainly not being involved in war. As a result, the book's analysis is about this transformative transgression and its impact on a great many sectors, from nursing to public opinion.
Audience: Thanks to its investigation of gender, its transnational approach (Germany, France, England), and the "real-life" nature of the documentary sources (quoted in large fragments), this book will be appealing to several audiences, from nurses to historians of gender, sociologists, military historians, historians of the 20th century, and possibly also interested individuals who might not be included in the groups above.
Features: The book is divided into three major parts: before the war, during the war, and after the war, with the second section making up the core of the book. It is based on a close reading and refined literary analysis of 14 memoirs coming from Germany, France, and England, which are compared as much as the material allows. The analysis moves from the description to the interpretation, shifting from nursing and military history to a meta-analysis of the impact of the facts on the place and condition of women in such a manly circumstance as war. The analysis, both factual and literary, dismounts the rhetorical devices of memoirs to better understand the strategies of the memoirs and, hence, also their impact on contemporary readers. More broadly, by constantly contextualizing the facts/experience of the war and the actions/reactions of the nurses under consideration as reported in their memoirs, the investigation brings to light the interplay between extraordinary circumstances and the translation of personal experience into societal messages putting social processes in motion.
Assessment: This is an original and interesting contribution to gender studies, coming from an unexpected field. Based on a literary genre that could easily be defined as minor and is, in any case, largely understudied, this refined analysis of anonymous nurse memoirs elevates to the rank of primary sources. The transnational approach is particularly relevant in a time of globalism, crossing the boundaries and, more than anything, the hostilities of that time. At the end, this is a piece in "histoire vécue" that unfolds under our eyes in a way that is almost a documentary. The topic could very well lend itself to cinematographic historical realizations (documentaries).
