‘Sunless lives’: District nurses’ and journalists’ co-construction of the ‘sick poor’ as a vulnerable population in early twentieth-century New Zealand

Abstract

Portrayals of vulnerable groups in public media, government reports and professional accounts tend, by definition, to focus on their deficits in order to identify need and shape appropriate health care responses. This article within the cultural history of nursing considers a different construction of one vulnerable group in the past, the ‘sick poor’ in early 20th-century New Zealand. The research analysed primary historical sources that offered rich descriptions of the sick poor, drawn from one major daily newspaper and the country’s professional nursing journal, 1900–1920. The article argues that in co-constructing the sick poor as a vulnerable group, district nurses and journalists primarily used the trope of ‘sunless lives’. However, they also constructed them as resourceful, resilient and determined. This article offers the construction of the sick poor by district nurses and journalists in early 20th-century New Zealand as an example of a more nuanced construction that goes beyond a one-dimensional portrayal of vulnerability.