Defining Moments in Medical History – Nurses' Narratives of their Everyday Experiences of a Key 20th Century Historical Event – the First Use of Antibiotics

Abstract

This article provides illustrations of how West Yorkshire nurses described their experiences of new technologies during their working lives in the 1940s. This paper focuses on nurses’ experiences of using the first antibiotics. The narratives are from life story oral history interviews which provided a rich collection of nurses’ memories. Ten extracts from four of the transcripts are used to provide an insight into how these drugs were used and how the nurses viewed their impact. Methodological and theoretical issues of using oral history and life story approaches in nursing are explored. Concluding issues relate to how nurses as health care professionals perceived their ‘everyday life’ experiences in ‘ordinary’ settings and how they interpreted their past experiences of major historical health care moments