Geertje Boschma

The World Health Organization has identified the importance of improving the rates of breast/chest feeding for population health. Canadian health organizations have put public health resources toward breast/chest feeding support. Despite statements of purpose describing health promotional interventions to be focused on improving overall population health, many times these methods are based only upon biomedical knowledge and fail to adequately address the needs of diverse populations. Thus, in this paper we critique a Canadian policy providing clinical guidance to care providers through the application of a relational inquiry framework. We draw on the first author’s experience as a Public Health Nurse delivering breast/chest feeding support within the scope of these guidelines to further illustrate the point. The results from published evidence are integrated within this critique to provide an evidence base for policy improvement recommendations to improve the social, cultural, and political components of breast/chest feeding typically overlooked in current standards.

Black nurses are at the margins of the annals of history and there is a dearth of historical accounts of their work. Drawing on our historical research about Black nurses in British Columbia (Canada) between 1845 and 1910, we point to the complexity of Black women's lives and argue that Black nurses disrupted the conceptualization of Blackness and Black womanhood of the time. We demonstrate the vital contributions of Black nurses to the health of communities and add to existing scholarship that redefines the nursing narrative: one in which white nurses are not the start and end point of history.

Talking Therapy is an important contribution to the scholarship on psychiatric nursing history and the history of post-World War II mental health care. Existing histories of psychiatric nursing often focus on the development of professional nursing practice and education in large mental hospitals. This book, on the contrary, examines the way psychiatric nurses in emerging American mental health clinics outside of the mainstream public and underfunded mental hospital system set in motion a new role for nurses in public health and community mental health as clinical nurse specialists, and in psychiatry, as nurse therapists. What upcoming nursing scholars in the early 1950s initially framed as ‘talking with patients’ gradually...

Maureen Lux’s Separate Beds provides a sophisticated analysis of the complex history of Indian Hospitals in Canada. Lux sees this history in the broader context of twentieth-century Canadian health services, health policy, and medical science, which lifts the analysis beyond frameworks of either victimization or binary constructs of colonizer and colonized. Rather, examining multiple, complex influences, Lux argues that Indian hospitals were intimately connected to the establishment of general hospitals and public health insurance, the persistent medicalization and racialization of Aboriginal people’s health, and the enduring federal-provincial tension concerning Aboriginal health care. Separate Beds complicates the acclaimed equality and accessibility of the liberal Canadian health care system, highlighting the system’s marginalization of Aboriginal health. Lux employs a wide range of sources, convincingly arguing that Canada’s health economy has continuously disadvantaged Aboriginal people because of the way it systematically separated socio-political and, lately, environmental questions of clean water, housing, and employment from issues of health care. The book’s title, Separate Beds, stands as a metaphor of the systematic isolation of Aboriginal peoples, symbolizing the racism, inequality, and marginalization inherent in Canada’s health care system. Lux thus frames Canada’s alleged progressive and liberal health care system alongside the persistent “problem” of Aboriginal people’s poor health, emphasizing how these are interconnected rather than distinct narratives. Her analysis depicts a deep cultural and historical process of the normalization of inequity symbolized in the reality of separate wards, hospitals, and health services.

Book Review in Nursing History Review | Volume 11, Issue 1 The Rise of Caring Power: Elizabeth Fry and Josephine Butler in Britain and the Netherlands Drenth, Annemieke van Haan, Francisca de BOSCHMA, GEERTJE, RN, PHD Nursing History Review Vol 11 Issue 1 , DOI: 10.1891/1062-8061.11.1.195 Article The Rise of Caring Power: Elizabeth Fry and Josephine Butler in Britain and the Netherlands Close