The Boer War: Contents and Sources
The Birth of Army Nursing
The Boer War is important for British Army nursing as it was the first major conflict for Britain in which nurses in any numbers had been deployed, and at the end of the war a new nursing service was set up, the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS), which saw nurses becoming a formed component of the British Army.
Although there are published accounts of the Boer War and nursing histories that cover this period there were no accounts of who the nurses were themselves. The nurses who served in South Africa were pivotal to the acceptance of the need for nurses and nursing in time of war and that they should be wherever the sick and wounded were. Prosopography was chosen to illuminate this body of nurses in order to discover what characteristics they possessed as a whole, what contexts motivated their choosing to serve, and how they as nurses helped to forge military nursing as an acceptable and necessary part of modern warfare.
In the following sections you will find how I set out the case for the birth of Army nursing in my PhD alongside other material gathered since:
The Context
Volunteering
The Ladies
The Nurses
- Creating a prosopography
- Ages
- Place of Birth
- Marital Status
- Social Class
- Training Hospital
- Employment Status
- Experiences
- Nursing Diaspora
- Honours and Awards
- Nurses who Died
Army Nursing
The list of nurses that was created as part of my research is still available at http://baseportal.com/cgi-bin/baseportal.pl?htx=/pcansr/Research/research.
