I just love this history site I found. It is terrific for a history buff like me, as it contains first person accounts dating back several hundred years ago. I’ve been looking at entries related to health and nursing, but they cover all kinds of topics.

This is an interesting audio interview with a nurse named Bruce Priebe who became infected with HIV and subsequently became an AIDS activist in the 1980s.

PRIEBE: I was a nurse for eight years before I found out that I was HIV+. And I like to think that I was delivering healthcare in a caring, compassionate way and a way that did not bring any harm to anyone. And I didn’t have a personality change after I found out I was HIV+. I still feel that way. There are a lot of healthcare workers that are HIV+, including physicians. But we do not allow them to tell us that because when they do we hit them over the head with a hammer. So I can understand why people chose not to do it. Unfortunately, because again, that creates the illusion that there aren’t, that there’s just this isolated little group.

I don’t really consider myself a political activist, but you’d be amazed at how active you can become when this is happening to you and to your friends and your family. I think it’s called a lot of us into a type of activism that we might not have imagined seeing ourselves doing. We formed a civil disobedience group called the Forget-Me-Nots and we had t-shirts with pictures of people close to us who had died with their names and the dates of their birth and death. And we went to the Supreme Court and were arrested. And when we were at the FDA in 1988, we were chanting 40,000 died and I remember thinking, what a horrendous number of people — 40,000 people. And yesterday I read there were 153,000 people and God only knows how many thousands of people will have died by the time this film is seen.

Unfortunately, the audio or transcript doesn’t say if Priebe became infected in the workplace via a needlestick, or if he was a gay male who picked it up sexually, or so on. I think that information is important to the interview, as it would demonstrate that healthcare workers were very much at risk, especially in the early days of the epidemic.

For nurses working during those good old times, it probably didn’t seem that way. If nurses think that working conditions are bad now, please take a look at this except from the autobiography of Mary Roberts Rinehart, who trained as a nurse in 1893.

That first night duty was simply plain hell. Nowadays, when I have occasion to employ a nurse, she talks of eight-hour shifts, of a dozen things I do not understand. That hospital of one hundred and fifty beds, and with emergency operations day and night, was staffed with thirty nurses, all student nurses. We ran the wards, the private rooms, the operating rooms—two of them—the general dispensary, and the eye and ear clinic. Such a thing as a graduate nurse coming in to care for a private patient was unknown. Instead, during the second year of training, a small number of seniors was sent out on private duty. What was paid for them went to the hospital, not to them.

The nowadays that Mary is talking about is circa 1930, as her memoir was published in 1931. A lot had changed in the 40 years since her first night of training. Eight hour shifts–how novel. I highlighted what she said about graduate nurses coming in to care for a sick patient–hospitals back then were staffed with student nurses, give or take a few head nurses. It was your basic slave labor, and many hospitals eagerly opened nursing schools (some quite dubious) in order to get free labor that they could work as hard as they wanted, and without any restrictions on job description or hours worked. By 1930, however, it seemed that the free ride was coming to an end, and a number of labor laws had been passed.

I had three wards, C, D, and E, on that night duty. Also I had the emergency ward—E, however, was a convalescent ward, and gave no trouble. But D was a nightmare. It was the men’s medical ward, and to it came the delirious typhoid cases, an occasional delirium tremens, any sick man who needed help. Not only was typhoid still raging in the city that year, but the aftermath of the panic of ‘93 which had ruined my father had filled the wards. Disease was fostered by ill-nourished bodies, and unemployment was still rife. That winter the bread lines wound for blocks around the city streets and men lay at night for shelter on the bare floors of the station houses. When they were brought in, injured or sick, they were ragged and filthy, their bodies gaunt. Sometimes they tried to kill themselves and we got them, dazed with drugs, writhing with poison, wet from the river.

The drug cases were very bad. If the drug had been a narcotic they had to be kept awake, roused from coma; they had, as soon as possible, to be walked about. One interne had a heroic method. He knotted towels, dipped them in ice water, and beat them to keep them awake. Then, an orderly on one side, himself on the other, he walked them up and down, up and down. They would stagger, go to sleep on their feet. More ice water, more walking. When they reached the walking stage they lived.

The training was the worst of it, as the vast majority of student nurses went into private duty after graduation. A few worked for the emerging public health service, and a few must have stayed on in the hospital as a head nurse or instructor, but hospital work was primarily unpaid labor for students. Mary Roberts barely survived her training, and married a physician soon after she graduated, and never worked as a nurse. She went on to have an extremely successful career as a writer.