Home Visit, 1950s: Nurse and Patient on a Matelassé Bedspread

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Home Visit, 1950s: Nurse and Patient on a Matelassé Bedspread — Archive & Atlas

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Home Visit, 1950s: Nurse and Patient on a Matelassé Bedspread — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-71925D

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A district nurse in her pale blue uniform makes a house call on a middle-aged woman who is lying on a chenille-spread bed, smiling broadly and holding the nurse's hand. In the 1950s the district nurse still came to you, because the assumption was that a patient's home was a reasonable place to deliver medical care, and that the nurse who arrived there was a professional whose stethoscope and good posture were sufficient equipment. The patient is wearing a pearl necklace, which was not vanity but simply what a woman of her generation put on when someone was coming over, even if that someone was going to handle her arm. The nurse's back is to the camera, her attention entirely on her patient, and the whole transaction has the unhurried quality of an era before the ten-minute appointment slot was invented. The photograph was taken because someone thought this ordinary act of care was worth commemorating — and they were right, because the system that made it routine is now mostly gone.

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