The unexpected project

Florence Nightingale has been creeping into the corner of my eye since the first time I visited Dusseldorf back in 2013. I was visiting my brother's brother-in-law who lived at the time in Kaiserswert, once a village now a suburb of Dusseldorf.  It also happens to be the place where Nightingale trained as a nurse. On that first visit David took me to see her bedroom, which is laid out museum-like in the corner of a still functioning hospital. As with so many other small mementos of historical moments that first year in Germany this visit left me with a sense of awe and a happiness at being able to see places one usually only hears about. 

Fastforward to 2020 and corona-style seminars. The one positive thing of 2020 has been the availability of zoom seminars from all corners of the globe, time differences permitting. Through one of these I met an American midwife settled in Suffolk, England. When she found out my research into German midwifery she very excitedly told me of a project: Florence Nightingale had written a book on midwifery and started a birthing ward in King's College hospital back in the day. Would I be interested in helping her make it more known? 

can't miss the cat

So the beginning of 2021 finds me in full historian mode with a book review, a writing project, some seminar teaching and generally trying to survive this bizarre time, which admittedly does not necessarily have much to do with being a historian or does it? Well, back some years ago I decided to study the history of medicine and in that niche world I read a lot about contagion and quarantine, pandemics and vaccinations. A younger me was fascinated by walking past the same place as Goethe had, this newer 2021 version is still coming to terms with living through a situation I studied about. Because it will possibly surprise some of you, though maybe it won't, to find out that with all its advances the world has not moved from 1918 and earlier methods of disease control. Yes, that is right, 1918 and earlier. Quarantine is old, really old and became a global method of disease control, from its medieval European past, through the international sanitary conferences of the 19th century. Whether or not kitty with a mask from back in the day actually happened or a 2020 person decided it would be fun to photoshop this one, the wearing of masks during a pandemic did in fact occur. All this to say I have spent the past year feeling as if I am living in the books I once studied.

Back to the project, lying-in hospitals are not something Nightingale came up with. She would have seen them in action in Germany where they had existed for well over 100 years by the time she was a student there. Lying-in hospitals were established in the German territories of the Holy Roman Empire during the 18th  century after the enactment of a series of medical edicts. The edicts were created to regulate the types of education medical practitioners should have in order to practice legally. For this new mode of training to take place it had to be institutionalised and student midwives had to have pregnant women to practice on. This type of training at the clinical bedside with live patients had been started by Pietist (reformed Lutherans) at the start of the 18th century and had quickly spread throughout the German territories. It was a natural progression from the lectures in which phantoms (models) had been used to simulate the human body. Demonstrations and practices on these phantoms were increasingly common as the century progressed at most universities where medicine was taught. 

The project will bring to light the work proposed by Nightingale that brought German-style birthing practices to England. It will also highlight the problems faced at the lying-in hospital and Nightingale's proposals for solving them. Unfortunately the resistance of the medical community to the proposed reforms forced Nightingale to close the lying-in hospital. She saw its closure as a better guarantee for the protection of women, such was the resistance she faced to reforms. Had she been successful I hazard to think that midwifery in Great Britain would today be different, more German-like, had she succeed in her reforms.