Going to Nursing School

Heroes Remember

Going to Nursing School

Transcript

Well, in my day of course there weren't too many choices for women, for young women. You could be a teacher or a nurse or a secretary or maybe a telephone operator or you could marry young and be a wife and mother, but you couldn't really do a heck of a lot. Unless you came from a family with lots of money and then in those days even there were women doctors and what not, but very few. So I wanted to do something different with my life, but I didn't, I wasn't quite sure how to do it and I went in training at the Owen Sound General and Marine Hospital and, because all nurses were trained in hospitals in those days and it was reasonably, financially my parents could handle it because in those days you sort of, they supplied your uniforms and your books and everything and you supplied them with cheap labour really, so it worked out that way. Mind you at the same time you learned, you learned the practical side of nursing and you learned the classroom side and the theory, and it was a three year course and, we practised on live patients. We didn't use mannequins and occasionally we used each other, and that's, that's how you learned nursing. We didn't have a lot of orderlies running around, we didn't have male nurses, we didn't have, so whatever we did with male patients and female patients, we did, the nurses did. And it was a hierarchical system because the director of nursing was God herself, and the chiefs of medicine, like the male doctors, all of whom were male doctors, were even higher Gods than the director of nursing so you know. You learned as a student nurse, if a senior nurse came into the room, or a doctor came into the room, you stood immediately. That was training. So training as a registered, training as a nurse, it taught me, discipline, which held me in good stead later on because if you don't have discipline in your life, you can't self, you can't discipline yourself. And the military I suppose in many ways, was sort of a piece of cake after that. We hear a lot of whining today about you know how tough the military is. Well they hadn't been through nurses training in those days. Mind you nursing has changed a lot since then.

Description

Mrs. Robinson describes how and why she decided to go to nursing school and what it was like.

Shirley Robinson

Shirley Robinson was born in Bruce County Ontario on April 22, 1932. She found the idea of joining the military to be very exciting. She had a successful career which saw her move through many positions in both the operational and administrative side of the forces. Upon her retirement, Shirley Robinson was actively involved in initiatives to further the cause of women’s rights.

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