“They Gave Their Care, but We Gave Loving Care”: Defining and Defending Boundaries of Skill and Craft in the Nursing Service of a Manitoba Mental Hospital during the Great Depression

Abstract

The School of Nursing at the Brandon Hospital for Mental Diseases was established in 1921 to equip the hospital with a corps of nurses equal to those found in urban general hospitals. While the school replicated the form of the general hospital training school, its credential was rejected by the national association of graduate nurses. Without the possibility of registration the mental nurses of the 1920s evolved a culture of resistance to the strictures of the training school, one which included affiliation with a trade union. Although still shut-out by the general nursing community, the nurses of the 1930s, arriving with a different sense of their occupational and social mobility, were more disposed to embrace the professional ideology of the training school. By invoking their superior ability to care and their learned capacity to function in the unpredictable environment of the mental hospital, they constructed mental nursing as a skilled craft based on proprietary knowledge, different from the work of both the general hospital nurse and the untrained ward attendant.