providing a forum for staging exhibitions
The first exhibition held 1998 at the University of Melbourne's History of Medicine Museum in the Brownless Library www.chs.unimelb.edu.au/programs/jnmhu/resources
was curated by Dr Sioban Nelson and entitled: Feminine Industry: nursing work at the bedside and beyond
Curated by Dr. Sioban Nelson,
School of Nursing
The University of Melbourne.
"Feminine Industry: nursing
work at the bedside and beyond"
is an exhibition which traces the important role of nurses and the impact
of technology on nursing practice.
This exhibition of photographs and
artifacts focuses on the history of nursing activity in our hospitals,
exploring the themes: patient observation; hygiene and infection control;
nursing interventions; transport and mobility.
Observing the patient has long been
central to nursing practice. This exhibition examines both the changing
approaches to monitoring the patient’s condition and the manner in
which a nurse records these observations.
The war on germs was fought by nursing labour. It
was the nurses who scrubbed, cleaned and sterilised equipment and treatment
areas. It was nurses, too, who were responsible for the development and
implementation of skilled techniques in the maintenance of sterile spaces
that are essential for safe surgical, medical and nursing interventions.
Peek in the side rooms, at the nurse's station, in
the preparation rooms and ante theatres at the end of the nineteenth century
or over the first half of the twentieth century and you would have found
an army of industrious nurses. The many thousands of hours of recycling
work in any one nursing career saved the hospital budget enormous sums
of money and no doubt made the extension and development of the twentieth
century hospital financially viable. Nursing labour was an almost free
commodity to the hospital until the 1960s. Today economic efficiency involves
a reduction of nursing hours. Recycling and re-use equipment, despite
purchase costs and environmental concerns, are now simply too expensive.
Despite the fact that we always think of the nurse
at the hospital bedside, nurses, like their patients, have been everywhere
and anywhere. This exhibition emphasises the range of Victorian nursing
activities over the past century, which took place in the hospitals, homes
and clinics of Australia, and in the war zones of the world.
This exhibition was held between 22 June and 20 November
1998 at the University of Melbourne Medical History Museum in the Brownless
Medical Library.
top of page
