Nurses and Doctors 1660-1820: An Uneasy Alliance

Join Professor Alannah Tomkins at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh to explore the unstable working relationship between nurses and doctors in the time before nursing reform.

Nurses working before the period of reform in the 1850s have popularly been written off as drunk and incompetent – but does this stereotype hold up to scrutiny?

This lecture will consider the lived experiences of women employed as nurses in the years between the final outbreak of plague and the birth of Florence Nightingale, and their interactions with male medical practitioners. The two occupational groups formed an uneasy and unstable alliance in private, in both domestic and institutional care settings, but public exposure generally saw this alliance break down. This lecture will also explore what the nurses might have thought about their problematic position in the work-place.

Professor Alannah Tomkins is a Professor of Social History at Keele University and author of Medical misadventure in an age of professionalisation, 1780-1890.

Students and under 18s with ID cards and medical practitioners who are Fellows or Members of the College will be admitted free of charge.

Please email library@rcpe.ac.uk (if you are a student, under 18 or a Fellow or Member of the College and would like to be added to the attendee list.