Defining Moments in Medical History – Nurses' Narratives of their Everyday Experiences of a Key 20th Century Historical Event – the First Use of Antibiotics

This article provides illustrations of how West Yorkshire nurses described their
experiences of new technologies during their working lives in the 1940s. This
paper focuses on nurses’ experiences of using the first antibiotics. The
narratives are from life story oral history interviews which provided a rich
collection of nurses’ memories. Ten extracts from four of the transcripts are
used to provide an insight into how these drugs were used and how the nurses
viewed their impact. Methodological and theoretical issues of using oral
history and life story approaches in nursing are explored. Concluding issues
relate to how nurses as health care professionals perceived their ‘everyday life’
experiences in ‘ordinary’ settings and how they interpreted their past
experiences of major historical health care moments.