Blurring the Boundaries of Space: Shaping Nursing Lives at the Red Cross Outposts in Ontario, 1922–1945

Abstract

Historians and other scholars interested in the history of hospitals have investigated the links between medical architecture and the organization of space with the evolution of modern medicine. The transformation over time in the architectural for of medical institutions has tended to reflect developments in medical science and therapeutic efficiency as well as elements in the broader social climate. Some authors, however, have argued for the agency of structure and spatial organization, to consider that they are not just containers with which human activities take place, but which also actively construct or constitute social practices and relations. Most studies of this nature have centred on large medical buildings especially in urban areas, and have examined the impact of architectural arrangement in relation to administrators and architects, physicians and patients. Fe have considered the interconnections of form and space with nurses, despite the prominence of institutional nursing labour since the late 19th-century. The following discussion begins an exploration of these concepts within the rural environment. Between 1922 and 1984, the Ontario Division of the Canadian Red Cross Society administered an outpost program in which it operated small hospitals and nursing stations in isolated communities throughout the northern reaches of the province. This article will focus primarily o n the one-nurse stations that the Division managed during the interwar years and the nurses that it hired to staff them. The interior spatial organization of these outposts, which led in particular to their multiple functions as tiny hospitals, community health centres and nurses' homes, not only shaped both the professional practice and the social or private lives of the Red Cross nurses but also contributed to the diffusion of contemporary precepts in health and medical care throughout a remote population.