Feeding and Healing Bodies and Souls: German Women in Nursing, 1830s-1850s

Nursing care of the 1830s-40s required significant financial stewardship, material resources, spiritual fortitude and political support alongside the everyday routines of cleaning, cooking and home visiting. The minutiae of Catholic, Protestant and other Prussian institutional donations, budgets and schedules, government records and occasionally women's own writings reveal how German nursing was not a singular and timeless profession. Rather, the feminisation of nursing emerged out of a myriad of gendered ways elite, bourgeois, religious and working women collectively cared for the poor and the sick even before bacteriology and maternalist women's movements transformed nursing in the late nineteenth century.