Deborah Madden & Anita Rupprecht

Neo-Victorian Constructions of Nursing During Covid-19: Contested and Contesting Representations of Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole

That Florence Nightingale’s bicentennial commemoration coincided with Covid-19 and the UK’s first lockdown gave ample opportunity for discussion about how the so-called ‘lady with the lamp’ would have ‘tackled’ the global pandemic. From claims that Nightingale would have been a ‘fearsome thorn’ in the British Government’s side (Hoyos, 2020), to the extolling of her clinical and public health principles as a reminder when curbing the spread of Covid-19, Nightingale’s ‘legacy’ and cultural memory has been leveraged in variously complex ways, sometimes at a critical angle to the UK Government’s remediation of her as a symbol of imperial nostalgia and a forerunner of NHS nationalism. Temporary Covid-19 hospitals built around the UK were named in honour of Nightingale, while British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, repeatedly invoked the public to remember the ‘pioneer of modern nursing’, praising ‘today’s Nightingales’, while citing ‘traditions’ in countries like India that continue to honour exceptional nurses with a Florence Nightingale Award every year. This overtly nationalist remediation of Nightingale, unmoored from the wider transnational colonial contexts in which she was engaged, has served as a convenient ‘screen memory’ during the emerging crises of pandemic times. Meanwhile, the Florence Nightingale Foundation released a ‘special collage’ of nurses and midwives working on the frontline during COVID-19 to mark the 72nd birthday of the NHS in July 2020, as part of a ‘Nurse Behind the Mask’ campaign to celebrate the many nationalities making up the NHS, encouraging ‘all non-BAME nurses and midwives to join in and to show solidarity with their BAME colleagues’. This formed part of a contested politics of memory around Nightingale that drew explicit attention to the rich ‘cultural tapestry’ and medical heritage of healthcare in Britain in light of health inequalities and Covid mortality rates amongst BAME frontline workers. In this context, Yvonne Coghill, diversity lead nurse of NHS England, highlighted the importance of naming temporary COVID-19 recovery centres after Mary Seacole, Jamaican nurse and fellow ‘pioneer’. Contemporaneous with Nightingale, Seacole continues to be either marginalised within British history and cultural memory, eclipsed, indeed, by the preponderance of mainstream commemorative practice dedicated exclusively to Nightingale or represented repeatedly as the exceptional racialised ‘other’ to Nightingale in support of (neo)liberal narratives of multicultural inclusivity that work to construct, manage and organise histories of ‘difference’ within the fraught racial politics of the contemporary health crisis, and more widely. This paper will track and trace the remediation of specifically neoliberal, neocolonial and neo-Victorian constructions of Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole and histories of nursing during Britain’s first lockdown. These trajectories are situated within the complex politics of memory that has also sought to simultaneously challenge the legacies of British Empire imbued within the Government’s adoption of Nightingale and a corresponding NHS nationalism. This counter-politics of memory has seen the mobilisation of a transnational and anticolonial critique that historicises the healthcare inequalities exposed by Covid-19, further compounded by neo-liberal austerity measures.

Deborah Madden is a cultural historian and Deputy Director for the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton, where she leads on the area of medical histories. Her forthcoming book, Victorian lives between Empires: Perspectives on Colonial Knowledge, Imperialism and British Cultural Memory, is due to be published in the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing series.
Anita Rupprecht is a Principal Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Brighton. Her research focuses on histories and representations of transatlantic enslavement, resistance and abolition. She is also interested in the politics of cultural memory and reparative history, especially in relation to archives, ‘race’, and the legacies of Empire. She has published widely in these areas, e.g. History Workshop Journal, Race & Class, Slavery & Abolition and International Review of Social History.

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