The Royal Children’s Hospital Heritage Project is run by a project team comprising RCH staff and historians from Context. Our guest bloggers from Context will be giving regular updates on their experiences as they delve into the rich history of the RCH.
View the previous instalments here:
The RCH Heritage Project #3: Personality in the Papers
The RCH Heritage Project #2: First Look at the Archives
The RCH Heritage Project #1: Bringing Our History to Life
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The RCH Heritage Project #4: History and Imagination – Nurses at the RCH
Imagination is a powerful thing. Have you ever read a book and been excited to hear that it had been turned into a movie? Only when you see the characters on screen, you’re surprised to find they don’t look anything like what you imagined?
This is a familiar feeling when we are researching. We read all about a person in the documents they have left behind—a letter to a friend, or a journal entry perhaps—and we imagine what they look like or how their voice sounds. Our imagination starts to bring the
person to life. Sometimes we stumble across a photo of them, sometimes we don’t. When we do, it completes the picture. When we don’t, our imagination keeps working for us.
Imagine what happened last week when we opened a box containing items of nursing uniforms that date all the way back to the 1890s. Real pieces of clothing that nurses at the hospital actually wore. Some of them still had blood stains!
Our imagination went into overdrive – conjuring up images of what the nurses looked like wearing those very uniforms, and how they would have looked in the eyes of the children they cared for.
We couldn’t help wondering what it would have felt like to wear the high-waisted dress and apron. Would it have been as uncomfortable as it looked? Would the cap and veil have been stiflingly hot in summer? And how long would it have taken to get dressed for work by the time collars, sleeves, armband, cap and veil were attached?
With these thoughts jumping around in our minds, Bronwyn (the keeper of the RCH Archives) led us to a box of material donated to the hospital by former nurse Megan Davies.
Nurse Davies was at the Children’s Hospital in the 1930s. We looked through her collection with great excitement. There was a fascinating notebook that listed diets and recipes specific to particular medical conditions; what to feed a child with pneumonia or polio, for example. And then, we found a photo of her. Suddenly our mental picture of Megan Davies was complete. It almost felt like we might see her in person if we went across the hallway into one of the
wards.
One of the most exciting parts of this project is imagining the people whose stories and lives are recorded in the archives. With amazing objects like nurses’ uniforms, personal notebooks and procedural guides, we can imagine what it was like to live in a time that is long gone. The past blurs with the present and the history of the RCH becomes about people and real lives instead of dates and records.
Katherine Sheedy and Sarah Rood
Project Historians