Nursing in Canada
The evolution in the design of
nurses' caps, from nun's coif, to no cap, reflects the history of
nursing in Canada. The first nurses to come to Canada from Europe
were nuns.
The Hospitalières, a Roman Catholic nursing order, arrived
in Quebec in 1639 to establish a medical mission that expanded to
become the Hôtel-Dieu. They introduced the first formal
apprenticeship training in nursing in North America. Nursing nuns
had no special headdress for nursing, but wore the coifs that were
part of their habit. The
nun's
coif would come to influence the design of both religious and
secular nursing.
The British colonies did not have the organized approach to health
care that New France had. Nursing was done informally by female
family members, with the occasional consultation by a physician.
The few hospitals employed charwomen who provided patients with
rudimentary health care. While they often brought useful experience
to their work, they were often viewed as slovenly, lazy and drunken.
Whether these women worked in patients' homes, or in hospitals,
they wore their everyday clothes. Most working women at that time
wore a white cap, but there was no special "nursing" cap.
A revolution in medical practice by the mid-nineteenth century
had a profound effect on nursing. At the same time, Florence
Nightingale developed a system to train "respectable" women in
nursing, which served as a model in English Canada. The first nurse
training programme based on the hospital apprenticeship model was
established in 1874 at the
Mack
Training School for Nurses in St. Catharines, Ontario. Nurses
who graduated from these training programmes, were, for the first
time, required to wear uniforms to distinguish them from their
untrained competitors.
|