“Testing Nursing Borders in the Border City: The Making and Undoing of an Autonomous Demonstrator School, 1947-1952”
Please note, this seminar takes place on Monday, November 22 at 12 11 am.

Abstract: Between 1947 and 1952 the Canadian Nurses' Association (CNA) established the Metropolitan School of Nursing as an academically and financially independent, nurse-run academy that would work in tandem with Windsor, Ontario’s new Met Hospital. The objective of the "Demonstrator School" was to show that an independent institution run by nurses could attract better candidates to the field, give them an academically superior training in a shorter period of time, and achieve secure sound finances through remuneration from the hospital for the hours its trainees did work there. Initially, the school was a success, welcomed by the Met Hospital, medical observers and the press throughout the Western world. But in 1949 the project was sideswiped by a scandal that led to legal wrangling with a new hospital board. By 1952 the CNA determined that it would have to close the school when the pilot program ended despite a consensus among experts that its educational objectives had been met. The talk reconstructs the feminist professional impulses behind the school, maps its novel approach to nursing education, and explores how the moral conservatism of the early Cold War constrained innovation in nursing pedagogy.