Punishment, Forgiveness, Drunkenness, and Praise: Nurses in the Council Minutes of Halsar Naval Hospital, 1755–1775

Nursing practice at Haslar Naval Hospital was regulated by the British Royal Navy’s Sick and Hurt Board. Before 1795, when the position of hospital governor was created, on-the-ground authority was in the hands of medical practitioners through the collective governance of the Physician and Council. This paper examines how Haslar Naval Hospital’s Physician and Council navigated the instructions of the Sick and Hurt Board and whether they strictly followed these regulations when they disciplined nurses. Areas for discussion include the complexity of authority in nursing practice during everyday ward-based medical care. Why did the Physician and Council choose to discipline some nurses and not others despite the strictness of the regulations? Rather than the drunken, ineffective stereotype normally associated with eighteenth-century nurses, the minutes of the Physician and Council show a much more complicated story of authority and nursing discipline.