Abstract
This essay reviews recent feminist scholarship, autobiographical narrative and fiction which explores nurses' engagement with empire in Africa and elsewhere in this century. Such literature suggests that while nursing work may have improved native health in colonized regions, it also contributed significantly to the establishment and stabilization of the racialized order of colonial rule. Of particular significance was colonial nursing's intervention into the reproductive practices of native women, resulting in the loss of local knowledges and autonomy, the disruption of complex social links and indigenous health strategies, and the expansion of markets for western capitalism.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Allman, J. (1994). Making mothers: Missionaries, medical officers and women's work in colonial Asante, 1924–1945. History Workshop Journal, 38, 23–47.
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities. London: Verso.
Anderson, W. (1992). Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile: Laboratory medicine as colonial discourse. Critical Inquiry, 18, 506–529.
Arnold, D. (1993). Colonizing the body: State medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenth century India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Arnold, D. (1988). Imperial Medicine and indigenous societies. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Beck, A. (1970). A history of the British medical administration of East Africa 1900–1950. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bhaba, H. (1994). The location of culture. New York: Routledge.
Birkett, D. (1992). The ‘white woman's burden’ in the ‘white man's grave': The introduction of British nurses in colonial West Africa. In N. Chaudhuri & M. Stroebel (Eds.), Western women and imperialism: Complicity and resistance (pp. 177–188). Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press.
Burchill, E. (1967). New Guinea nurse. London: Angus and Robertson.
Cesairé, A. (1993). From: Discourse on colonialism. In P. Williams & L. Chrisman (Eds.), Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: A reader (pp. 172–189). New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Comaroff, J. & J. (1992). Medicine, colonialism, and the black body. In Comaroff & Comaroff (Eds.), Ethnography and the historical imagination (pp. 215–234). Boulder: Westview Press.
Davies, C. (1980). A constant casualty: Nurse education in Britain and the USA to 1939. In C. Davies (Ed.), Rewriting nursing history (pp. 102–122). London: Croom Helm.
Davin, A. (1978). Imperialism and motherhood. History Workshop, 5, 9–65.
Dean, M. & Bolton, G. (1980). The administration of poverty and the development of nursing practice in nineteenth century England. In C. Davies (Ed.), Rewriting nursing history (pp. 76–101). London: Croom Helm.
Fanon, F. (1978). Medicine and colonialism. In J. Ehrenreich (Ed.), The cultural crisis of modern medicine (pp. 171–197). New York: Monthly Review Press.
Farmanfarmaian, A. (1992). Sexuality in the Gulf War: Did you measure up? Genders, 13, 1–29.
Fitzgerald, R. (1997). Rescue and redemption: The rise of female medical missions in colonial India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In A.M. Rafferty, J. Robinson & R. Elkan (Eds.), Nursing and the politics of welfare (pp. 64–79). New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–77. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1990 [1978]). The history of sexuality, Volume I: An introduction. New York: Vintage.
Gilman, S. (1992). Black bodies, white bodies: Toward an iconography of female sexuality in late nineteenth century art, medicine and literature. In J. Donald and A. Rattansi (Eds.), 'Race', culture and difference (pp. 229–251). London: Sage.
Gilman, S. (1985). Difference and pathology: Stereotypes of sexuality, race, and madness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Good, C. (1991). Pioneer medical missions in colonial Africa. Social Science and Medicine, 32(1), 1–10.
Hulme, K.C. (1956). A nun's story. Boston: Little Brown and Co.
Hunt, N.R. (1992). Colonial fairy tales and the knife and fork doctrine in the heart of Africa. In K.T. Hansen (Ed.), African encounters with domesticity (pp. 143–171). New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Hunt, N.R. (1988). 'Le bebe en brousse”: African birth spacing and colonial intervention in breast feeding in the Belgian Congo. The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 21(3), 401–432.
JanMohamed, A.R. (1985). The economy of manichean allegory: The function of racial difference in colonialist literature. Critical Inquiry, 12(1), 59–87.
Jordan, B. (1983). Birth in four cultures. London: Eden Press.
Latham, G. & Latham, M. (1995). Kilimanjaro tales: The saga of a medical family in Africa. New York: The Radcliffe Press.
Llewellyn-Jones, D. (1971). Everywoman: A gynaecological guide for life. Boston: Faber and Faber.
Lovett, M. (1989). Gender relations, class formation and the colonial state in Africa. In J. Parpart and K.A. Staudt (Eds.), Women and the state in Africa (pp. 23–46). Boulder: L. Rienner.
Maggs, C. (1980). Nurse recruitment to four provincial hospitals 1881–1921. In C. Davies (Ed.), Rewriting nursing history (pp. 18–40). London: Croom Helm.
Marks, S. (1994). Divided sisterhood: Race, class and gender in the South African nursing profession. New York: St. Martin's Press.
McCleod, R. (1988). Introduction. In R. McCleod and M. Lewis (Eds.), Disease, medicine and empire: Perspectives on Western medicine and the experience of European expansion (pp. 1–18). New York: Routledge.
McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest. New York: Routledge.
Memmi, A. (1991 [1978]). The colonizer and the colonized. Boston: Beacon.
Minchin, M. (1985). Breastfeeding matters: What we need to know about infant feeding. Alfredton, Vic.: Unwin and Allen Australia.
Morsy, S. (1995). Deadly reproduction among Egyptian women: Maternal mortality and the medicalization of population control. In F. Ginsburg and R. Rapp (Eds.), Conceiving the new world order (pp. 162–176). Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Nestel, S. (1995). 'Other’ mothers: Race and representation in natural childbirth discourse. Resources for Feminist Research, 23(4), 5–19.
O'Neil, J. & Kaufert, P. (1990). The politics of obstetric care: The Inuit experience. In W. P. Hendwerker (Ed.), Births and power (pp. 53–68). Boulder: Westview Press.
O'Neil, J.D. & Kaufert, P.L. (1995). Irniktakpunga!: Sex determination and the Inuit struggle for birthing rights in northern Canada. In F. Ginsburg and R. Rapp (Eds), Conceiving the new world order (pp. 59–73). Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Oakley, A. (1984). The captured womb: A history of the medical care of pregnant women. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Palmer, G. (1988). The politics of breastfeeding. London: Pandora.
Patton, C. (1992). From nation to family: Containing “African AIDS.” In A. Parker, M. Russo, D. Sommer & P. Yaeger (Eds.), Nationalisms and sexualities (pp. 218–234). New York: Routledge.
Poovey, M. (1988). Uneven developments: The ideological work of gender in mid-Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pratt, M.L. (1992). Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. New York: Routledge.
Ranger, T. (1992). Plagues of beasts and men: Prophetic responses to epidemic in eastern and southern Africa. In T. Ranger and P. Slack (Eds.), Epidemics and ideas: Essays on the historical perception of pestilence (pp. 241–268). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ranger, T.O. (1981). Godly medicine: The ambiguities of medical mission in southeast Tanzania, 1900–1945. Social Science and Medicine 15B, 261–277.
Robertson, B.M. (1993). Angels in Africa: A memoir of nursing with the Colonial Service. New York: The Radcliffe Press.
Rose, N. (1994). Medicine, history and the present. In C. Jones and R. Porter (Eds.), Reassessing Foucault: Power, medicine and the body (pp. 48–71). New York: Routledge.
Said, E. (1993). Culture and imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Smith, S. (1992). The other woman and the racial politics of gender: Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham in Kenya. In J. Watson & S. Smith (Eds.), De/Colonizing and the politics of discourse in women's autobiographical practices (pp. 410–435). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Stoler, A. (1991). Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Gender, race, and morality in colonial Asia. In M. di Leonardo (Ed.), Gender at the crossroads of knowledge (pp. 55–101). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stoler, A.L. (1989). Rethinking colonial categories: European communities and the boundaries of rule. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 31(1), 146–161.
Stoler, A.L. (1995). Race and the education of desire: Foucault's history of sexuality and the colonial order of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Summers, A. (1988). Angels and citizens: British women as military nurses 1854–1914. New York: Routledge.
Summers, C. (1991). Intimate colonialism: The imperial production of reproduction in Uganda, 1907–1925. Signs, 16(4), 787–807.
Van Esterik, P. (1989). Beyond the breast-bottle controversy. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Vaughan, M. (1991). Curing their ills: Colonial power and African illness. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press.
Vicinus, M. (1985). Independent women: Work and community for single women 1850–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ware, W. (1992). Beyond the pale: White women, racism and history. London: Verso.
Waldram, J.B., Herring, D.A. & Young, T.K. (1995). Aboriginal health in Canada: Historical, cultural and epidemiological perspectives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
White, L. (1990). Separating the men from the boys: Construction of gender, sexuality and terrorism in central Kenya, 1939–1959. International Journal of African Historical Studies, 23(1), 1–25.
Whitehead, J. (1992). Lessons of Katherine Mayo's Mother India. Canadian Woman Studies, 13(1), 47–50.
Williams, P. & Chrisman, L. (1993). Introduction. In P. Williams & L. Chrisman (Eds.), Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: A reader (pp. 1–9). New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Nestel, S. (Ad)ministering Angels: Colonial Nursing and the Extension of Empire in Africa. Journal of Medical Humanities 19, 257–277 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024908110021
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024908110021