Naval and Military Nursing in the British Empire c. 1763-1830

This dissertation analyses the work of female nurses in military and naval hospitals from the mid eighteenth century until the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century. Nursing history has primarily forgotten these women, or when they do enter into historical narratives, it is often as a foil when compared to the medical practitioner. Pre-Nightingale nurses are often framed by nursing historians as ineffective, ignorant drunkards, the embodiment of the Dickensian Sairey Gamp stereotype. By examining why medical practitioners and naval and military administrators decided to hire female nurses, it is possible to explore two frameworks of investigation in this dissertation. First, the importance of nurses to eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century military and naval clinical hospitals, was shown in official correspondence, regulations, and medical treatises. Examining the crucial role of nurses in maintaining a healthy healing environment through cleanliness and ventilation reintegrates nurses into a previously male medical practitioner dominated narrative. In Britain, both patient care and domestic duties were viewed, societally, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as distinctly female skills. At West Indian stations, the ideal nurses were also female. Yet, the additional layer of race and accompanying theories of racialized immunity to tropical diseases, combined with the stratified labour market of the islands, meant that Black women were considered by medical practitioners to be the best nurses. These considerations resulted in the employment of enslaved women at the Bermuda Naval Hospital. Second, I counter historiographical preconceptions about pre-Nightingale nursing through a detailed prosopographical analysis of the nursing workforce at Plymouth Naval Hospitals, in conjunction with the nursing regulations for military and naval medical systems of care. As the experiences of nurses of Plymouth Naval Hospital show, the physical stability of naval hospitals allowed for nurses to develop healing and care skills over a period of longstanding employment. These nurses were not, as the historiographical prejudice contends, primarily thieves and drunkards. Furthermore, a comparison of military and naval regulations demonstrates that the regulatory structure of naval hospitals, and the position of nurses in them, cannot be explained merely by the permanence of their institutions. Nursing and nurses were part of a broader professionalization of healing practices in the second half of the eighteenth century. As complex institutions, naval hospitals only functioned when everyone’s role in the hospital was clear. In the army, by contrast, the role of nurses was less explicit and not carefully delineated. When recollecting the pre-Nightingale period of nursing, it is often the military nurses who are recalled by nursing historians – women seen even at the time as replaceable, untrained, and unnecessary. Reconfiguring our view to include the naval nurse – valued, crucial to hospital operation, and with a defined role – complicates the long-standing progressivist account of nursing after Nightingale to illustrate continuity between the two periods

Factors influencing the reporting of dating violence prevalence

The topic of dating violence has been controversial ever since Makepeace published his groundbreaking study in 1981. Initially, many critics tried to deny that physical violence between adolescent dating partners occurred. Even those who supported Makepeace’s idea had a hard time accepting the 20 percent prevalence rate that he had found. But subsequent confirmatory research forced people to open their eyes to the issue. Although the presence of dating violence has now been accepted, even after 20 years of research, a number of questions still remain. For example, there is still a question regarding the true prevalence. In addition, there has yet to be a satisfactory answer as to which factors predispose individuals to be perpetrators or victims of dating violence. And there has been a general failure to examine factors that could cause inherent bias in the findings. Examination of such factors is the primary focus of the current study, in conjunction with replication of several key findings from previous literature

Endocannabinoid gene × gene interaction association to alcohol use disorder in two adolescent cohorts.

Genetic markers of the endocannabinoid system have been linked to a variety of addiction-related behaviors that extend beyond cannabis use. In the current study we investigate the relationship between endocannabinoid (eCB) genetic markers and alcohol use disorder (AUD) in European adolescents (14-18 years old) followed in the IMAGEN study ( = 2,051) and explore replication in a cohort of North American adolescents from Canadian Saguenay Youth Study (SYS) ( = 772). Case-control status is represented by a score of more than 7 on the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT). First a set-based test method was used to examine if a relationship between the eCB system and AUDIT case/control status exists at the gene level. Using only SNPs that are both independent and significantly associated to case-control status, we perform Fisher's exact test to determine SNP level odds ratios in relation to case-control status and then perform logistic regressions as analysis, while considering various covariates. Generalized multifactor dimensionality reduction (GMDR) was used to analyze the most robust SNP×SNP interaction of the five eCB genes with positive AUDIT screen. While no gene-sets were significantly associated to AUDIT scores after correction for multiple tests, in the case/control analysis, 7 SNPs were significantly associated with AUDIT scores of > 7 ( < 0.05; OR<1). Two SNPs remain significant after correction by false discovery rate (FDR): rs9343525 in (p =0.042, OR = 0.73) and rs507961 in (p = 0.043, OR = 0.78). Logistic regression showed that both rs9353525 () and rs507961 () remained significantly associated with positive AUDIT screens ( < 0.01; OR < 1) after correction for multiple covariables and interaction of covariable × SNP. This result was not replicated in the SYS cohort. The GMDR model revealed a significant three-SNP interaction ( = 0.006) involving rs484061 (), rs4963307 (), and rs7766029 () predicted case-control status, after correcting for multiple covariables in the IMAGEN sample. A binomial logistic regression of the combination of these three SNPs by phenotype in the SYS cohort showed a result in the same direction as seen in the IMAGEN cohort (BETA = 0.501, = 0.06). While preliminary, the present study suggests that the eCB system may play a role in the development of AUD in adolescents