The Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing hosted a symposium about the history of healthcare during the Revolutionary War on Wednesday.
The Feb. 18 symposium was held at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and featured 13 speakers from the Philadelphia area who shared their expertise on the evolving role of caretakers throughout United States history. It had 75 registered attendees and expanded upon the center’s “Nursing the Revolution” exhibit launched last month, joining campus-wide programming ahead of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The daylong symposium, titled “Nursing the Revolution: Care Work in Revolutionary America,” included a keynote speech given by University of Colorado lecturer Susan Brandt, which highlighted the role nurses played during the war’s “major health crisis.”
“The American Revolution has long been narrated through the familiar grammar of political rupture, military strategy, and ideological transformation,” Brandt said during the event. “Foregrounding care communities reveals a revolution sustained not only by formal institutions — such as military hospitals or medical departments — but also women’s expert labor, Black medical knowledge and caregiving traditions, and Indigenous healing expertise.”
2011 School of Arts and Sciences graduate and Curator for the Barbara Bates Center Jessica Martucci told the DP that the Revolutionary War is not often discussed in conversations about the history of medicine, healthcare, and nursing.
Martucci explained that it was “a nice opportunity” to “provide a space for that scholarly community to come together” — noting that the field has comparatively fewer researchers than other areas of study.
Martucci organized the symposium alongside Meg Roberts, a Bates Center Fellow at Penn Nursing and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh, who echoed Martucci’s enthusiasm for the scholarly discourse and cited the COVID pandemic as a source of inspiration in her historical study of healthcare.
Completing her research during a health crisis helped Roberts see “how people think about caregivers” and “fueled” her interest. The exhibit and symposium aimed to “build more momentum” around the discussion of what nursing and caretaking looked like in the 18th century.
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“It’s such a niche topic — there’s not really been much scholarly community in it, there’s no conference equivalent for it,” Roberts told the DP. “It was nice to have an excuse to create that with the exhibit … there’s suddenly a lot more interest in early American history — particularly in health and care.”
Martucci and Roberts both mentioned that the names and roles of nurses during the war were “edited out of the history.”
Caregiving labor has “historically been very gendered and feminized,” Martucci said.
“Bringing those stories back in is all the more important after the pandemic,” Roberts added.
Seventh year PhD candidate Jennifer Reiss, a speaker at the event and a former DP staffer, discussed the role of midwives and reproductive care during the Revolutionary period.
“Thinking about the disabilities of reproductive labor should expand our sense of the prevalence and nature of disability in early American society,” Reiss said during the event. “Understanding the key role gendered medical practice played in those disabilities can provide us with more context for the continuities in poor maternal health outcomes.”
Reiss explained that male physicians began “denigrating” female medical practitioners as their numbers in the field increased through the 18th century in an interview with the DP.
“Women actually have poor postpartum outcomes when they’re attended by male physicians in this period,” Reiss said. “What ends up happening is you have higher rates of maternal death; you have higher rates of maternal disability.”
The conference introduced additional healthcare-related topics, including the medical practices and experiences of minority communities.
2014 College graduate and assistant professor at Swarthmore College Elise Mitchell discussed smallpox inoculation and treatment in the African diaspora while speaking at the event.
“The basis for a lot of our modern ideas about vaccination — the idea that you could provide someone with something that would create immunity, and do it on a population scale — is something that really comes out of African diasporic history,” Mitchell told the DP.
Mitchell added that the symposium featured “really great discussion” that highlighted how women who engaged in this labor were “medical innovators doing a lot of the crucial front lines work that enabled the success of the revolution”
“Having these conversations right now at the 250th, it’s presented a great occasion for us to sort of revisit the history of nursing and be excited and champion the parts where we've made progress, and really question the parts where we haven’t,” Mitchell said.
