Nursing in Canada originated with the nursing sisters who tended the first French settlers in the early 17th century. By the mid 19th century, however, the massive influx of British immigrants to Canada resulted in a growing need for nurses. Lay women working for a wage began filling these positions.
The majority of these women came from working class or poor homes whose only alternatives were factory or domestic labor. Thus nursing was regarded as a very low status position. In the 1860s Florence Nightingale established a new nursing profession. Her reformers tried to bring respectability to the profession by encouraging middle-class women to participate. Nursing was now to be revered as the epitome of the womanly roles of serving and mothering. Yet hard work, often shocking working and living conditions as well as long hours, discouraged the integration of middle-class women into nursing.
This picture of a ward in the Montreal General Hospital in 1910 gives no indication of its earlier history. In 1875, the hospital requested guidance from Florence Nightingale to set up a "respectable" school of nursing. The conditions were such, however, that the nurse who was sent to establish the school and her three successors resigned in despair: Hospital funds were taken to purchase champagne to be used in building up the reserve forces of patients to be operated upon, while ragged ticks filled with straw were the only beds provided for the patients, and a basket of straw could be swept up after the students' rounds.
The nurses were sleeping in cubicles built into an old ward, and after a stormy night, their beds were often festooned with snow. No sitting-room was provided. The dining-room was presided over by an autocrat who required each nurse to take her food from a side table, wash her own dishes, and place them in a cupboard after the meal. There was small inducement for women of a refined type to enter the school.
Low wages were a constant problem. Governments argued, however,that this servitude was similar to the unpaid work women did at home and was to be regarded as a profitable training for married life.
Courtesy: Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum, Montreal
