Almonte’s Great Train Disaster: Shaping Nurses’ Roles and the Civilian Use of Blood Transfusion
| Autor: | Cynthia Toman |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2004 |
| Předmět: |
Canada
Blood transfusion Delegation business.industry medicine.medical_treatment media_common.quotation_subject Nurses Health technology Context (language use) General Medicine History 20th Century First world war Disasters Nursing Work (electrical) Health care Workforce medicine Blood Transfusion business Railroads media_common |
| Zdroj: | Canadian Bulletin of Medical History. 21:145-157 |
| ISSN: | 2371-0179 0823-2105 |
| Popis: | Blood transfusion was initially a small-scale, labour-intensive therapy administered by physicians. Through the first decades of the 20th century, transfusion comprised a lJiast resort" measure used and tested primarily in the context of war. Media accounts of the Almonte train disaster on the night of 27 December 1942 linked survival to the newly established blood bank located 42 km east in Ottawa, Ontario. This event did not constitute a "first time"occurrence or a "great discovery" in the history of blood. But it did illustrate in a very visible and public manner that blood transfusion technology was now readily available for use in general hospitals and civilian populations. Canada had an infrastructure for the collection, processing, storage, and transportation of blood products, and for the recruitment of blood donors by the mid-1940s. As the need for blood declined toward the end of World War n, transfusion became a technology in need of application. The extension of transfusion to civilian populations, however, would require a ready source of labourincreased numbers of health care workers who were available continuously with the necessary knowledge and skills to assume the responsibility. Nurses were well situated for this technological role by a convergence of scientific, economic, labour, gender, professional, and educational influences that both facilitated and constrained blood transfusion as a nursing competency. This paper examines how the expanded use of one medical technology shaped related roles for nurses. lransfusion ultimately influenced nurses' work and the composition of the workforce as the first medical act"delegated" to nurses in Ontario (1947), setting a precedent for the delegation of further technologies over the next four decades. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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