Présentation faite par Pilloud Séverine, Bovet Cécilia
Titre
«Moral mistakes» and «professional failure» in healthcare: evolution of common complaints from patients, families, physicians or hospital directions and development of ethical discourses about care between 1890 and 1970, as documented within the Journal Source, published by the first lay school of nursing in the world, La Source(Lausanne, Switzerland).
Auteurs
Pilloud Séverine, Bovet Cécilia, Bovet Emilie and with the collaboration of Droux Joëlle
Abstract
Based on a research financed by the Swiss National Fund for Scientific Research[1], this paper aims at analysing the changing views about ethical issues, looking more precisely into what was considered as bad or good with regard to evolving professional standards. Our study is investigating the long time history of the making of the nursing profession through one of the oldest professional review, the Journal Source. This exceptional corpus of archives dates back to 1890 and is still published nowadays. It was created by the founders of the first lay nursing school in the world, La Source, which opened in 1859 in Lausanne (Switzerland). This publication was notably designed to give moral and professional advice to students as well as to nurses once they had taken their degree; it regularly refers to values and knowledge which concurred to shape the ideal of the perfect nurse, while also sometimes revealing usual fails or lacks that had raised complaints from patients, their families, or less often from physicians.
Our methodology consists in a critical analysis of the main themes tackled in the Journal Source, which we extensively digitalised in order to select discourses thanks to different key-words such as “mistakes”, “complaints”, “failures”, “vocation”, “moral injunction”, etc. Whenever a particular mistake or case was mentioned, we also studied secondary archives – such as students’ files, epistolary pieces, institutional reports etc. – to examine which measures had been taken.
Our major finding lays in the fact that there used to be a very clear distinction between moral and professional fails, persisting until the late 1950s: the former mostly referred to a way of being expected from the nurse, partly because of the alleged qualitiesof women such as patience and abnegation. This moral dimension, often encapsulated by the word “vocation”, stood as extremely crucial, especially during the first part of the 20thcentury, in a society where religious legacy in care was still envisioned as fundamental. By contrast, the professional value was more linked to the qualificationsa good nurse should acquire; the emphasis on knowledge and skills was progressively accentuated, in parallel with the progress and specialisation within medical sciences and therapeutics from the 1950s.
[1]The building of the nursing profession in Switzerland in a transnational perspective: the circulation of ideas and professional practices between the local level and the foreign countries as documented in the «Journal Source» (1890-2015) (request 100018_166060; Séverine Pilloud, PhD, main grant applicant; Joëlle Droux, PhD, secondary applicant; Emilie Bovet, PhD & Cécilia Bovet Ma, research team)
