Nursing the Enemy in the First World War

Abstract

This article explores the ethical dilemmas posed by the experience of nursing enemy or prisoner-of-war (POW) patients during the First World War. It asks two key questions. First, what was at stake in the evocation of the relationship between the female nurse and the enemy patient in nationalist images and narratives designed to justify a nation’s conduct in the war and to demonize the enemy? Second, how did both trained and volunteer nurses evoke the experience of nursing such patients in their diaries, letters and memoirs? It concludes that these writings reveal contradictory attitudes. Some nurses emphasized their role as ‘neutrals’, underscoring the importance of impartiality in their medical work in line with the transnational humanitarianism embodied in the symbol of the Red Cross. Others reproduced nationalist and xenophobic stereotypes. Such nurses presented the nursing of enemy patients as incompatible with their patriotic duty and therefore as less deserving – or, in some cases, as undeserving – of their care.