While travelling this month I found a number of interesting books. One is this memoir by a British nurse who enlisted in training during the WW1 wave of patriotism and decided around age 98 to write the memoir. It fits right into my niche interest of nursing in different times and circumstances, and is as far as I can find the only nursing memoir of this subject and time period
Let’s take a quick look at the book and I’ll share my thoughts
Bookish Quick Facts
- Title: Dorothy: The Memoirs of a Nurse (1889-1989)
- Author: Dorothy Moriarty
- Published: 1991, Sidgwick & Jackson
- Length: 191 pages
- Recommend: For anyone interested!
Here’s the Synopsis
Dorothy Bishop was born in 1889, just two years after Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee. A hundred years later, she tells her story, of how ‘a bit of Victoriana’ shocked the expectations and escaped the constraints of her large and unusual family to become a nurse in the London of the First World War and the Cairo of the early twenties…
…This is the first book to tell how a training nurse survived in the days before antibiotics and unions: when surgeons baptized babies before operating; when cockroaches in the ward were an everyday hazard; and when nurses worked fourteen-hour days for #8 a year. After qualifying, a brief spell of private nursing left Dorothy disillusioned, until her sense of adventure took her to Cairo – exotic, eye-opening and full of romance
From the jacket
My Thoughts
I always feel weird rating memoirs but this was a decent and interesting read. Dorothy has a great narrative voice that makes even duller parts easy to absorb – plus she’s pretty funny.
She lived at the tail end of the Victorian era and brought a lot of those principles forward into her nursing training and career. I always learn a lot about the historically British way of life reading these kinds of books.
I came for the nursing though, obviously. Their lifestyles and training were wild during those times when exploitation wasn’t a widely recognized term. I love that even 100 years ago they had a lot of the same issues we do now – impossible patients, ridiculous family members that ignore orders, limits that need to be set, and packing 24 hours of work into a 12 hour work day lol. There are stories of death and life and how we just internalize these things and keep on rolling because the work never stops.
Times have changed so much but in some ways they’ve barely changed at all.
I thought the ending was a little abrupt and an odd place to end her memoir. Plus she then paraphrased about 60 years into a two page long Afterword. We already know she’s resilient but I have so many more questions after reading the Afterword!
Anyway, Dorothy an interesting read for sure if you’re interested in early 1900s nursing and Victorian morals within an unconventional lifestyle. Dorothy has an engaging voice with plenty of humor and nursing anecdotes that anyone in the field (or nursing hopefuls) can relate to.
OneReadingNurse.com 