Digital Nurses: Digitizing the Quintessential Women’s Profession

The gendered nature of nursing makes the profession the prototypical female occupation; an occupation of interest to women\u27s history on multiple levels. Numerous primary resources exist from which to study this profession. To date, few primary documents pertaining to nursing have been digitized. This paper describes two digitization projects carried out by the University of Pennsylvania\u27s Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing which focus on nursing. The first project digitized the photo collection of the Alumnae Association of the Philadelphia General Hospital (PGH) School of Nursing, one of the largest hospital based nursing schools of nursing operating in the United States in the last century. The second project is a NIH funded project which created the Nursing, History and Health Care website, a site which analyzes and places in historical context critical political and social issues influencing the provision of nursing care. This paper will discuss digitization challenges and successes using nurses and the nursing profession as a focus of analysis. The central theme presents nursing as offering a unique opportunity to expand understanding of how this inherently interesting profession developed and challenges previous analyses which placed nurses at the periphery of hospital care activities