Month: December 2015

Dolan Collection Christmas Gift

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Alumna Jane Dickinson (PhD, 2000) with her Christmas gift for the Dolan Collection
Alumna Jane Dickinson (PhD, 2000) with her Christmas gift for the Dolan Collection

Santa Claus was good to the Dolan Collection in the person of his deputized elf, alumna Jane K. Dickinson, RN (PhD, 2000), who donated to the collection what she had received as a gift, the first English edition of Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not, published in London in 1859. You can read more about this copy’s history and how Dickinson was given the book here: http://nursemanifest.com/2016/01/17/nursing-history-and-a-book/

The slender volume shows wear, but that wear signifies the many hands and the frequent use of its many owners over the past 156 years. Notes on Nursing is the generative text of nursing practice and research, distilling Nightingale’s experiences in a variety of settings and establishing the foundational principles for nursing education.

First edition (London, 1859) of Nightingale's Notes on Nursing
First edition (London, 1859) of Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing

Nightingale’s book is still in print, as well as in a variety of digital versions, including Google Books, a Gnosis library version, a digital version provided by the University of Pennsylvania, and a Project Gutenberg version.

So why does a hard-copy material version still matter?

Paratexts

A book is more than the words supplied by the author; it has a material reality that surrounds and conveys the author’s text, including the typography and book design selected by the publisher, and, in the case of nineteenth-century books, the advertisements for the publisher’s other books situating this book within a discursive field. These supplementary materials are known as paratexts. Paratexts gave the readers at the time of publication a set of interpretive tools (for example, is the book to be read for entertainment, edification, education, or some combination of the three?), giving modern readers and scholars hermeneutic tools.

For example, the Nightingale first edition’s publisher (Harrison) featured advertising for a variety of topics, including heraldry and travel narratives, as well as medical works.

Marginalia

Throughout history, book readers have actively engaged in conversation with the books, highlighting and commenting on the words on the page, rather than just passively consuming them. Often found on the margins of pages, these marginalia provide us a window into the minds of previous readers of a particular book, pointing to what they found valuable or controversial in their reading.

For example, in our first edition a cryptic note has been slipped in between pages 6 and 7 on a scrap of paper: “[indecipherable] 1859-60.”

Provenance and Association

Related to paratexts and marginalia are the documentary evidence of previous owners (provenance) and previous owners of significance or renown (association). At its best, provenance documents a “chain of ownership” used to authenticate the object; sometimes the object is associated with a significant owner.

In our new acquisition, one owner has inscribed it: “Annie Bromley | March 26th 1880.” An Annie Bromley in Coburg, England, was married and having children at that time (The Bromley brothers, 2015). More distantly, Bromley (1911) identifies several Annie Bromleys in the United States, associated with Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Sales receipt documentation included also shows that the book was sold by book seller Donald A. Berry (“Specialist in Books on Economics, History, Science, Medicine and Periodicals) in London in August 1959.

The UConn School of Nursing has a personal connection to Nightingale. Our founding dean’s maternal grandfather, Cyrus Hamlin, was a Congregationalist missionary to the Turkish Ottoman Empire in the mid-nineteenth century whose bakery provided bread to Nightingale and her hospital patients in Scutari.

We are grateful to Jane Dickinson for this generous gift to a nursing history collection that began with the generosity of Josephine Dolan and has benefited from the thoughtful donations of many other alumni in subsequent years.

References

Bromley, V. (1911). The Bromley genealogy. New York: Frederick Hitchcock. https://archive.org/details/bromleygenealog00bromgoog

The Bromley brothers of Munro Street, Coburg. (2015, August 13). Fighting the Kaiser: Coburg and the First World War. http://fightingthekaiser.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-bromley-brothers-of-munro-street.html

 

Nursing and Child’s Play

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With the holiday season upon us, a time associated in many traditions with gift giving, particularly gifts to children, we recall the role of children’s toys and books in forming the childhood inclinations and interests that sometimes grow into our adult vocations and careers.

Golden Books Nurse Nancy
Golden Books Nurse Nancy (Photo: Barbara Slater)

The Dolan Collection houses a variety of dolls, toys, games, and children’s books related to nursing. Although some nurse researchers and faculty may cringe at what they perceive to be the trivializing or juvenilizing of a skilled health profession, childhood toys do have a powerful influence on who we become as adults. (See Metzler-Brennan, Lewis, & Gerrard [1985]; Bond [2002].)

Among the many childhood nursing toys in the collection, perhaps the best know is the Golden Book Nurse Nancy. Shown here with a Miss Curity nurse doll, Nurse Nancy was published in the early 1950s, becoming a staple of the early Baby Boomer generation. (Golden Books also published an analogous book for boys, Doctor Dan the Bandage Man.) Nurse Nancy also included what’s now called “product placement,” with Band-Aid brand bandages included (comparable to Miss Curity’s marketing of Curity brand products).

Nancy Nurse Simulates a Patient
Nancy Nurse Simulates a Patient (Photo: Barbara Slater)

The Nurse Nancy character had a comparable figure in the Nancy Nurse doll, shown here in a retail display fixture. The manufacturers of Nurse Nancy promised children a battery operated doll that sneezed, coughed, and talked, providing them also with a nursing cap and sickroom supplies. Nancy Nurse offered a virtual simulation of a child patient on whom the toy’s young owner could practice.

Nancy Nurse doll and furnishings
Nancy Nurse doll and furnishings (Photo: Barbara Slater)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These and other toys in the Dolan Collection remind us that our serious adult lives with their work and career begin with childhood play, the simulation of adult roles of healing and professionalism.

 

 

References

Bond, E. (2002). Remembering Nurse Nancy: A nursing educator reflects upon a powerful childhood role model. Reflections on Nursing Leadership, 28(4), 8-37.

Metzler-Brennan, E., Lewis, R. J., & Gerrard, M. (1985). Childhood antecedents of adult women’s masculinity, femininity, and career role choices. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 9(3), 371-382.