A Third Look at Sarah Gamp.
Nineteenth and earlier 20th-century readers of Charles Dickens's novel Martin Chuzzlewit accepted his character of Sarah Gamp as a credible representation of the worst of the old untrained hospital nurses. In the 1980s a number of revisionist historians took a second look at these nurses and concluded that Gamp was a caricature. This article takes a third look at Gamp, setting her into the context of earlier 19th-century hospital nursing and the workforce as a whole and demonstrates that Dickens's fictional character was based on a reality-there were numerous real Sarah Gamps.
Independent Scholar, Toronto.
Carol
C
Helmstadter
19e siècle; Sarah Gamp; discipliné; early 19th-century hospital nurses; infirmières; la société préindustrielle; le travail; pre-industrial society; work-discipline