Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Robert Carnegie <rja.carnegie@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2025 23:55:53 +0100
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On 07/07/2025 18:43, Joy Beeson wrote:
> On Sun, 29 Jun 2025 21:57:39 -0400, Joy Beeson
> <jbeeson@invalid.net.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> Come bedtime Wednesday, I'll be reading Usenet, and with
>> luck it will take months to find out how _Lost Burgundy_
>> comes out.
> 
> No luck.  I know how _Lost Burgundy_ came out, and am a few
> chapters into Ethics for Nurses.  (1916, IRRC)
> 
> Early on it says that first of all, a good nurse is a good
> woman, then a few pages later includes a quote that says
> that every person in a hospital has his duty.
> 
> Shows that they still believed that only women could be
> nurses, but had not yet adopted the meme that women were
> delicate sub-human creatures who are never included unless
> specifically mentioned.

Or - the difference between book author
and quoted author, aside - the pronoun "his"
was being allowed to stand for a man or a woman.

It could even be from Florence Nightingale.

If anyone thinks we have too many pronouns now,
i could argue that this example shows that in the
past, we had too few.  Although there, the good old
"singular they" would have worked.

Also, "nurse" used not to imply having education
in medical practices.  Just...  showing up.
I'm thinking about the Charles Dickens novel
standard of nursing.