“Nursing the Metropolis” Revisited: Eighteenth-Century London and the Nurses of Guy’s Hospital, 1725–1820

Abstract This article looks closely at the women who worked as ward staff at Guy’s Hospital between the hospital’s founding and the year of Florence Nightingale’s birth. It continues the task of reassessing the lives and contributions of women who nursed in the years before the onset of the nursing-reform movement. This article does not rest on extensive data: It cannot say with any confidence, for example, the proportion of women who worked as nurses that were spinsters rather than wives or widows. What it can do is to set out some indicative examples that belie our existing assumptions. The results assist on dismantling the stereotype of the prereform nurse and replace it with an appreciation of these women as health care participants. This article argues that the women were very rarely incompetent or drunkards and in contrast were frequently equal to the tasks set for them by hospital governors, with or without being literate. They were also people with family connections to the wider metropolitan population and even to people with whom they forged friendships during their employment. In other words, they were rounded individuals whose working lives were governed by their position as relatively impoverished female Londoners rather than by their lack of ability or motivation.