Table of Contents

Introduction: New Perspectives on First World War Nursing Christine E. Hallett and Alison S. Fell Part 1: National Identities 1. Making Sister Julie: The Origin of First World War French Nursing Heroines in Franco-Prussian War Stories Margaret H. Darrow 2. "Beacons of Britishness": British Nurses and Female Doctors as Prisoners of War Angela K. Smith 3. "I Begin to Feel as a Normal Being Should, In Spite of the Blood and Anguish in Which I Move": American Women’s First World War Nursing Memoirs Jane Potter Part 2: Professional Identities 4. "All for the Boys": The Nurse-Patient Relationship of Australian Army Nurses in the First World War Kirsty Harris 5. "Emotional Nursing": Involvement, Engagement and Detachment in the Writings of First World War Nurses and VADs Christine E. Hallett 6. A Sister’s War: The Diaries of Alice Slythe Janet Watson Part 3: Nurse as Witness 7. Negotiating injury and masculinity in First World War Nurses’ Writing Carol Acton 8. The Theatre of Pain: Observing Mary Borden in The Forbidden Zone Hazel Hutchison 9. Cubist Vision in Nursing Accounts Margaret R. Higonnet Afterword: Remembering the First World War Nurse in Britain and France Alison S. Fell

About the Author

Alison S. Fell is Professor of French Cultural History at the University of Leeds. She has published widely on French and British women and the First World War, including two edited volumes: (with Ingrid Sharp) The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives 1914-1919 (Palgrave, 2007) and Les Femmes face à la guerre (Peter Lang, 2009). She is currently completing a monograph, Back to the Front: Women as Veterans in France and Britain, 1916-33, and is leading an AHRC-funded research project entitled “Legacies of War 1914-18/2014-18.”


Christine E. Hallett is Professor of Nursing History at the University of Manchester, UK. She is Chair of the UK Association for the History of Nursing and was Founding Chair of the European Association for the History of Nursing. Professor Hallett holds Fellowships of the Royal Society of Medicine, UK and the Royal Society for the Arts, UK. Her publications include the critically-acclaimed monograph, Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War (Manchester University Press, 2009) and the popular Celebrating Nurses: A Visual History (Fil Rouge Press, 2010).