Author: Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook

Teaching Nursing on the Ward

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Black and white photograph of two women in nursing attire sitting facing each other at a narrow table. Text on the photograph reads: "The individual conference gives an opportunity for guidance."

Anna M Taylor’s 1941 Ward Teaching: Methods of Clinical Instruction is as detailed a breakdown of clinical nursing education as you could wish to see. Taylor takes the instructor or program manager through every step of setting up and executing a course of clinical instruction, right down to how to introduce a new nurse into the group and a list of seven factors that will determine the success or failure of a group conference on a single patient’s care.

Printed form for tracking nursing students.

Taylor is interested in every aspect of the instruction process and goes so far as to provide blanks of the forms she recomends; for example, this one for an individual conference between the student and head nurse. Taylor suggests a 30-minute format for these meetings, with the first five minutes spent on “establishing the tone of the conference.”

With a publication date in 1941, it’s difficult to tell from the volume itself whether it was printed before or after America’s entry into World War II, but Taylor’s prose certainly has a wartime efficiency feel to it, perhaps already inspired by efficiency studies of the 1920s and 1930s. There’s no time granted for chat, small talk, or any kind of work relaxation. Taylor’s nurses are on task one hundred percent of the time and not just with each other but, by implication, with the patients as well.

Introducing our 2023 Summer Fellow

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Picture of blonde Caucasian woman dressed in black and green with a bag over her shoulder standing in a greenhouse.

Hello everyone! My name is Savannah Flanagan, and I am a Ph.D. student at Baylor University studying history. This summer, I have the honor of serving as the Educational Resources Fellow for the Medical Heritage Library. Over the next few months, I will curate a collection on mental health and illness from the Medical Heritage Library’s extensive collection of online materials. This project will bring forward some interesting items and narrate the complicated history of mental health.


My initial interest in mental health and illness history began in the archives. As I read through the diary of an 18th-century Quaker woman, Patience Brayton, her consistent comments about feeling “low in spirit” inspired me to investigate how individuals experienced mental illness over time. This interest has led me to research how women in different religious communities wrote about mental illness and see the ways in which their religious community addressed it. In April, I presented the results of this project at the Popular Culture Association Conference, “‘The Comfort of My Drooping Spirit’: Managing Women’s Melancholy in 18th Century Moravian and Quaker Communities.” Ultimately these women were able to communicate their experiences with mental illness through their published memoirs and diaries, showing their religious community that melancholic feelings were not shameful and deserved sympathy. This attention to patients’ experiences will inform my approach to compiling the collection for the Medical Heritage Library.


My current research, which will be the topic of my dissertation, considers how the Moravian community practiced medicine, paying specific attention to the work and sacrifices of women and people of color. While looking into other aspects of healthcare, such as smallpox, vaccines, midwifery, and post-mortem care, I am also investigating how this pietist community managed mental illnesses over time. Reflecting the broader development of mental health care in North America, acceptance and empathy gave way to rejection and distancing over time.

As the Education Resources Fellow, I wish to not only highlight the experiences of the underrepresented, but to also make this history accessible by creating an informative and valuable collection. These resources will hopefully be useful for future researchers and educators in their efforts to share the difficult history of mental health.


I look forward to updating you all on my progress! If you have any questions about my personal research, please feel free to reach out to me at savannah_flanagan1@baylor.edu or find me on Twitter @sjflanagan17.

The Open Casebook

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It’s difficult to tell how close to the truth the reader is meant to believe the Passages from the diary of a late physician are — I suspect either not very or only close enough to titillate. Samuel Warren is the physician in question and the two volumes of his Passages are as full of drama as anything Dickens or Trollope plotted out: the struggle of early education, titled patients, mysterious requests, it’s all here!

Spring Reading

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Better weather calls for something a little light, possibly something you can pick up and put down easily, and the 1815 New family receipt-book fits the bill beautifully.

Including, over “eight hundred valuable receipts” covering topics from agriculture to writing, this is veritable mine of household knowledge.