A new article by Professor Melanie Oppenheimer explores the little known yet innovative international public health nursing program developed by the League of Red Cross Societies.
‘Nurses of the League: the League of Red Cross Societies and the development of public health nursing post-WW1’ is available online now in History Australia, the journal of the Australian Historical Association. Download your copy here
In the aftermath of the First World War, governments and a range of international voluntary organisations including national Red Cross societies were engaged in the development of a range of public health policies. From its inception, public health nursing was a major program of the League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS). The development and professionalisation of nursing became a major undertaking within its broader mission to improve health, prevent disease and alleviate suffering in peacetime. The LRCS’s Department of Nursing (later called the Nursing Division and then Nursing Bureau) was part of a General Medical Department and its work included the dissemination of information about child welfare, tuberculosis, communicable diseases, sanitation, and malaria.
Established in London in 1920, the international public health nursing courses organised by the League attracted hundreds of women from around the world. After an inaugural year at King’s College for Women, the program was transferred to Bedford College, University of London, where it evolved into an internationally recognised program educating hundreds of nurses through the interwar period. These nurses later returned to their own countries bringing new knowledge, intent on improving nursing education methods and public health practices and assisting the public health work of national Red Cross societies.
In this article, Melanie focuses on the early years of the LRCS’s international public health program, and how it transformed the careers of individual nurses and contributed to the development of nursing and public health across the world. The article provides us with new insights into role of the LRCS as a nascent supranational organisation facilitating the exchange of knowledge, information and education within the Red Cross Movement. In doing so, the paper reveals the geopolitical tensions, the competing and contested agendas, and the ideological conflicts that surrounded nursing training during the interwar period. It also points to the importance of institutional cultures in the histories of humanitarianism and foreign aid.
The LRCS helped shape the ideas and practices of a generation of highly influential women who went on to influence the public health systems of multiple nations. The article explores the varied experiences of the students and how they managed to create a longstanding global network based around professionalism and friendship.
Like to know more about the role of the Department of Nursing in the LRCS? For biographical information on the first three Directors of Nursing see Melanie Oppenheimer, ‘The personalities and gender of humanitarianism: Nursing leaders of the League of Red Cross Societies between the wars’ in Selective Humanity: Three Centuries of Anglophone Humanitarianism, Empire and Transnationalism, ed. Joy Damousi, Trevor Burnard & Alan Lester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), forthcoming.