Jean I Gunn, Nursing Leader

Cynthia R. Comacchio is an associate professor of history at Wilfrid
Laurier University and the author of Nations Are Built of Babies: Saving
Ontario’s Mothers and Children.

Natalie Riegler’s contribution to the Medical Lives series of
biographies (published under the auspices of the venerable Hannah
Institute for the History of Medicine) benefits from the author’s own
training in both nursing and the history of nursing.

Her subject, Jean Isabel Gunn, studied nursing at the renowned New York
Presbyterian Hospital before embarking on a distinguished career at the
Toronto General Hospital, where she became Superintendent of Nursing in
1913. Gunn also participated enthusiastically in important contemporary
public-health/welfare reform organizations, and was involved in the
campaign to professionalize nursing in Canada. She served as the first
Secretary for the Canadian National Association of Trained Nurses, which
became the Canadian Nurses Association in 1924.

Riegler’s careful, thorough, and readable discussion of Gunn’s
career and her contributions to Canadian health care is situated within
a sociohistorical context that makes this much more than the biography
of one nurse. Readers will learn much about the feminization of the
profession, changes and continuities in training and in the “work
culture” of nursing, controversies surrounding the issue of nursing
education, the history of the Toronto General Hospital, and the
evolution of the Canadian Nurses Association. This compelling biography
makes a valuable contribution to the historiography of nursing, health
care, medical professionalization, and women’s work in Canada.