The Place of Religion as an Interpretive Tool in Nursing History

Abstract

Guest Editor's Note Often historiography keeps religion at arm's length. In writing about the place of religion within history, David Gary Shaw discusses the challenges this brings, including rearranging conceptualizations of the religious and the secular, of our own vision, and the paradigms that organize our knowledge, so that we can see our way to a more productive and less anxious relationship between secular eyes and religious topics. As important are the ways we write about people whose beliefs differ from ours. Indeed, historians may need to revise their methods they are to cope productively with believers past and present, even if we can disregard what historians themselves believe. 1 In this issue, we feature two essays that open paths for historians of nursing to rethink the relationship between religion and nursing history. One is a local study by Anne Z. Cockerham and Arlene W. Keeling, who examine the Catholic Medical Mission Sisters as nurse-midwives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They are interested in the relationship between the sisters' religious practices and beliefs and the economics involved in their work with Spanish American clients. The other is an international comparative study by Susanne Kreutzer about deaconesses in Germany and the United States. She answers the question of why the German concept of the parish deaconess failed in the United States compared to its success in Germany. Women and religion is a relatively new topic in historical research, and interest is growing in international circles. An important milestone was Sioban Nelson's Say Little, Do Much , which first corrected the historical blind spot in nursing history. She argued that long before Florence Nightingale came on the scene, Catholic sisters were organizing home care, creating and administering hospitals, and volunteering their work in military and epidemic nursing. 2 Though she studied religious nursing orders in Australia, the United States, Germany, England, and Ireland, there has been little scholarship on women religious in the Nordic countries. Theologian and Dominican Sister Else-Britt Nilsen is an exception, and she has published a number of studies on Catholic sisters' nursing in Norway. Then the publication in 1998 of Susanne Malchau's innovative study of the Danish-born Catholic Sister Benedictine Ramsing was the beginning of serious scholarly interest in this research field in Denmark and in other areas of Scandinavia. 3 Other scholars of religious nursing bear mentioning. Katrin Schultheiss's examination of the professionalization of nursing in France integrates social, political, and religious issues in the evolution of nursing. It links themes of nursing and the state by showing how nurses forged a feminine citizen during the Third Republic. And it reveals continuities with nursing histories in other Western countries in class and gender struggles and the rise of the medical profession. 4 The two articles in this issue build on these works. They also support other social and cultural histories of nursing, ethnicity, and religion. For example, studies of Catholic sisters by Mary Tarbox, Bernadette McCauley, and Jean Richardson have shown particular influences of geographic region on hospital development and nursing. 5 However, they have mainly focused on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cockerham and Keeling expand these studies by focusing on a heretofore unstudied region, New Mexico, in the mid-twentieth century. Kreutzer shows the power of place as she analyzes distinct differences in parish nursing in the United States and Germany. My own research on the work of Catholic nursing sisters in the United States examines the construction of gender, religious, and economic roles as sisters successfully established large American hospitals. They ran their acute-care institutions with support from substantial Catholic immigrant communities. 6 But comparative studies are important, and Cockerham and Keeling's essay shows a very different picture of religious nurses in home care and a small clinic in the American Southwest. …