Re: Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back

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.
>