A Hospital in situ: Maternity Nursing Practice in Freetown since 1892

Historical Ethnography of Maternity Nursing in Sierra Leone;African Studies;Anthropology and Archaeology;History (General);Women"s and Gender Studies;Social Sciences;Anthropology and History

Diener, TaraStern, Alexandra ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Historical Ethnography of Maternity Nursing in Sierra Leone;    African Studies;    Anthropology and Archaeology;    History (General);    Women";    s and Gender Studies;    Social Sciences;    Anthropology and History;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/135784/tddiener_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This study is an ethnographic history of nursing, midwifery, and childbirth in Sierra Leone. Combining rigorous attention to a historical longue durée as well as evidence collected via ethnographic immersion, this dissertation’s focus is on practice, dress, and prestige in a single West African hospital. Written as a contribution to the history and anthropology of medicine in Africa, it also engages with literatures on bioethics, nursing, science and technology studies, dress, and visuality. It explores clinical practices, and situates these as knowledge and embodied memory. Its focus is the Princess Christian Maternity Hospital founded in Freetown, Sierra Leone by British missionaries in 1892. The lack of basic necessities and socioeconomic circumstances often mean that the hospital receives emergent, destitute cases. All the while its nurses wear uniforms that suggest complex, color-coded, historical hierarchies. This study asks what is at stake and for whom in this sartorial work and how the clinical and historical intersect on the wards. How have the perceptions of maternity nurses informed habits of giving and seeking maternity care in Freetown? The questions emerged during 15 months of historical research and ethnographic fieldwork, mining archives in Britain and Sierra Leone, and interviewing and coming to know childbearing women, students, and staff at maternity centers throughout Freetown. At PCMH, in particular, six months of intensive participant observation and semi-structured interviews enabled data collection and analysis. The arguments of this dissertation are several: Nursing practice at PCMH emerged through decades with maternity care providers contending with varying degrees of scarcity, precarity, and inequality. The context is a sedimented one, requiring a sedimented, visual methodology. The practice of nursing, much like the city of Freetown, was established with British ideals on African soil; they have long been inflected by social and spatial practices. Practices of circulation, mobility, and nursing care have been translated and transformed across generations. The seemingly anachronistic uniforms of PCMH nurses bear important evidence about intersecting logics, revealing much about prestige, hierarchies, humiliation, and implicit violence; consciously and unconsciously, these affective, material, and visual logics signify at multiple registers.