Modern Persia — Where Nursing Met History

Who were the American women who traveled to the ancient land of Modern Persia? Not diplomats. Not adventurers. Nurses. They built hospitals, opened the first nursing schools in the country, and gave women a professional path that would change the course of their lives.

Dr. Lydia Wytenbroek has spent years in the archives recovering this forgotten history. What she found will surprise you.

This is not a simple story of heroism. It's not a simple story of imperialism either. It's messier than that. More human than that. And right now — given everything happening in the world — it might be exactly the story we need.

Today's episode is brought to you by the Joan of Arc Scroll Medal, a beautiful brass alloy medal, designed by award-winning artist, Pat Benincasa. This uniquely shaped medal is ideal for holiday or as a special occasion gift!    Visit www.patbenincasa-art.com

Joan of Arc Scroll Medal
This brass alloy medal can be worn on a necklace, a keychain, dogtags, on a bag, or in your car.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Please Note: The views expressed by our guests do not necessarily reflect the views of the podcaster.

Follow me on Instagram!

Transcript

Pat:

Fill To Capacity where heart grit and irreverent humor collide. A podcast for people too stubborn to quit and too creative not to make a difference.

Pat:

Hi, I am Pat Benincasa and welcome to Fill To Capacity , Episode #136: "Modern Persia- Where Nursing Met History." Now, some histories live quietly in the margins, overlooked, underestimated, and waiting for someone to finally tell their story. Well, today's guest is that someone, Dr. Lydia Wytenbroek, is an assistant professor of nursing at the University of British Columbia, a social historian, a former surgical nurse and a scholar whose research takes us somewhere. Most of us have never thought to look into the lives of American women who traveled to Iran over a century ago, not as diplomats or adventures, but as nurses and healers. Her work uncovers a remarkable, largely forgotten chapter of history. One where faith, gender, ambition, and two very different cultures met in the corridors of mission hospitals. Now I gotta tell you this story. Well, it hit me in a very personal way.

Pat:

For the past 30 years, Iranian culture has had a personal presence in my life. Persian miniatures, small, intimate paintings were for me like a dictionary of painting, color and story, every detail, a lesson, every image, a world unto itself. The great poets, Saadi, Hafez, and especially Rumi, they're never far from my desk. And over the years I've had Iranian friends. So when Lydia's research found its way to me, whoa, it felt less like a discovery and more like a reunion. Now I'm getting to the, but folks, hang on. I've got more to tell you. Okay, now you may have, I've been calling this place Modern Persia and there's a reason for that. Now, stay here with me. The official switch from Persia to Iran happened on March 21st, 1935. And the timing was no accident. Reza Shah Palavi chose the Persian New Year to make it official, you know, new Year, new name.

Pat:

But here's the kicker. Iranians have been calling their country Iran since about 1000. BC Persia was the outsider's name coined by ancient Greeks. So in a sense, they were simply asking the West to catch up. Now the name change mattered because Persia represented only one region, one people. Iran embraced differing peoples differing tribes who called this land their home. Okay, I got one more thing to tell you. I promise I'll bring on the guest. Okay, here's one of those quirky history footnotes. During World War ii, Winston Churchill asked Iran to go back to being called Persia to avoid confusion with neighboring Iraq. When I say modern Persia, I know exactly what I'm saying. Now let's meet my guest, Dr. Lydia Wytenbroek. Welcome to Fill To Capacity. I'm so glad you're here.

Lydia:

Oh, thank you so much for the excellent introduction and it's such a privilege to be here with you today and chat about my work. So thanks for having me.

Pat:

Oh, I've been waiting for this one. I tell you what. Okay, now I have to ask you something I'm genuinely curious about. Of all the histories in the world waiting to be told all the topics a nursing historian could pursue, what was it that drew you to Iran?

Lydia:

You know, it's so fascinating. Just like my work, it's kind of an unexpected story involving a lot of serendipity. I was a MA student. I knew I wanted to do nursing history. I was a nurse. I'd gone back to do, this was my second degree in history and I was in UBC hospital, which is a hospital in Vancouver, Canada. And these retired nurses kept a closet of artifacts and some documents in this little closet. And I was looking through their stuff and they had a collection of 130 or so letters written by a Canadian nurse, Margaret Jackson, who worked in Iran with the World Health Organization. While she was there, she wrote these letters back to her family in Canada. So I wrote my MA thesis about her international nursing work in Iran, starting this maternal health clinic. But in her letters she mentioned the very first nursing schools in Iran were started by American missionary nurses.

Lydia:

And so I tried to research this. I went, I spent a lot of time trying to find anything out about this. There had been nothing really written about it at all. And this led me to search for the original documents, the Presbyterian Historical Society Archives in Philadelphia. There was hundreds of thousands of documents related to this medical mission and the mission more broadly. So I just found it so fascinating learning about the lives of these women and how significant they were actually to the development of nursing in Iran. So that's how I fell into the, the history kind of by accident.

Pat:

Wow, what a great accident. So let's start at the beginning. I think we're talking 1907 and the first American nurse arrives in Iran. Do we know who she was or what brought her there?

Lydia:

Yeah, so it's, it's interesting. There's three unexpected stories really in my work. The first is that the missionary physicians wanted to develop a surgical mission. This is a little bit unusual for medical mission work, but they were really keen to develop surgery as their key focus. And there's a lot of reasons for that. One of the reasons is that there was a lot of Iranian physicians who'd gone to Europe and Beirut and were being trained in coming back to Iran. So there was a little bit of a niche area where surgery wasn't being practiced. So I think the me medical missionaries, the physicians thought, oh, we can carve out this sphere of influence in surgery, but to perform surgeries, it required trained nurses to care for patients. We couldn't just send them home or you couldn't just do public health work or something like that.

Lydia:

It actually required trained nurses. So that led this vast surgical kind of mission led to these physicians arguing for trained nurses from the US to be sent to Iran to help establish this mission. And that's why the first nurse was eventually sent. It was at the, the quest of the physicians in Iran who were demanding, actually trained nurses to be sent, I think her name, I may be getting it wrong, but I believe her name was Faith Fisher. She was one of the first she came. And not too much is known about the earliest nurses. There's a few documents and letters about them in the 1920s and 1930s. As more nurses are sent to Iran, their files contain quite a lot of information and letters and documents.

Pat:

Well, first off, I cannot imagine a hospital, a surgery unit, any medical, anything without nurses because they are the heart and the drive of everything that goes on. That would make sense to me. Of course, you'd need nurses. They run everything, they do everything. It makes sense. So Lydia, these women were Presbyterian missionaries and trained nurses. Now I'm, I'm curious, how did those two identities work together? So you have Presbyterian people of a deep faith and then, then you have nurses going over there. Like were those the same thing, the faith and the, the work? How did that work?

Lydia:

Yeah, it's so fascinating. Like I kind of argue in my work that their mission was actually became a mission to promote the profession. They weren't so interested in evangelism. It doesn't come up very much in their letters. I have a quote from one missionary nurse who says, I was not a born missionary, but I am a born nurse or something like that. She says, so they really had this desire to cultivate nursing as a profession. Like it became their entire focus. It's all they wrote about. However, in coming to Iran, like when they applied to the Board of Foreign Missions (BFM) , the Presbyterian Board of Foreign missions was really the only US active mission body in Iran. So they kind of had to go through the Presbyterians. They weren't all necessarily Presbyterian. There's a couple interesting things. So some of them had a faith, I think it seemed like they wrote about it a little bit in their applications.

Lydia:

Maybe they had less ability to kind of evangelize once they got kind of drawn up into the work of educating nurses once in Iran. For others, their faith was not important. So there is, or some maybe non-existent. There is one record of a, A nurse. She was the third, I think generation born in Iran. So her parents had been missionaries. Her dad was a missionary physician in Iran. His dad had been a missionary physician born in Iran. So Iran was her home. She wanted to get back to Iran and the way for her to get back after doing some education in the United States was to apply to the BFM and to get back to Iran as a missionary nurse. So her goal was really, yeah.

Pat:

What is the BFM?

Lydia:

The Board of Foreign Missions specifically applied to the Board of Foreign Missions and she indicates in her application that she wanted to go home. She wanted to get back to Iran, she considered it home. And in her application she also wrote about how she believed Islam was just a good religion as Christianity. So she didn't seem to have any interest in evangelism or faith in that, in the way that we might think of missions. You know, the missionizing work.

Pat:

Now in your research and going through letters, Iran in the early 19 hundreds was a world most of us know absolutely nothing about. Were you able to paint a picture of what healthcare might have looked like there or the daily life for these American women living so far from home or some returning home?

Lydia:

Yeah, so it's interesting. Healthcare in Iran, there were some, what I found through reading others works and through the records is that there were some actually male nurses we might think of. There was a army or military hospital in Iran that had a kind of like, um, guidelines for the nurses. And indicated they were trained male nurses or male nurses who were engaging in the work at Iranian military hospital. This was in the 1800's. So there was some indication that there were some male nurses active. There was a lot of healthcare being carried out through the home. Women were largely separated. So it's not like women were typically going to male physicians or healers. It was often segregated in that way. Sure, there was a lot of midwives. Midwifery practice was very common. So women typically delivered in the ho in their homes by midwives.

Lydia:

So when American nurses entered the scene, there wasn't a precedent for trained nursing at all. You know, there was no nursing schools. They started the first nursing school. But what's kind of fascinating is that at the time that they were coming to Iran, there was a crisis kind of in Iran. So a lot of the press politicians were talking about Iran, the place of Iran in the modern world and in the realm of global nations. And there was, had been quite a high maternal mortality rate, quite a high infant mortality rate. And so there was this discourse, Mohamad Tavakoli, at U of T kind of talks about this medicalized political discourse where the fate of Iran was kind of linked to the health of the nation and the health of women and children in particular. So there was a lot of talk in the press about how can Iran emerge as a strong nation when its women and children are suffering from like ill health.

Lydia:

And so this discourse kind of enabled women to emerge as having a key role to play in the future of the nation. So some of these political cartoons would call on women in particular and say, we need women to come to rise up to cure the nation. This is what the, the discourse was. So it was a political discourse. What I argue is that it paved the way for these American nurses to have some impact with their schools. 'cause at the same time as they were kind of starting these schools, women were being called upon to act in the interest of the nation. So it kind of created new opportunities for women that at the same time aligned with these political goals and created these opportunities

Pat:

In your work. And I was reading your journals and oh my gosh, I was going through everything. In your work you describe these nurses as carving out a surprising degree of autonomy in a male dominated world. Now you're touching on how that came about, but what did that look like? I mean, you got these foreigners, these American women coming in and a very male dominated society. How did that work?

Lydia:

Yeah, it's so fascinating. So in a couple ways, missionary nurses did this. One was within the space of the mission itself. So the mission, the medical mission was very male dominated. Physicians kind of made the decisions. There was a medical committee. Nurses weren't originally on it. They eventually came to have a role to play in at least, um, having some input into this the decision making that impacted the medical mission. So they had to kind of navigate that. And it's so fascinating. So I'll start with this story. So initially the nursing schools were tied to the mission hospitals. There were seven mission hospitals. So there was one school started at each hospital. The nurses ran the nursing schools, but really they were linked to the interest of the hospital. That's why the physicians wanted them so that the students could provide the labor needed to care for the patients.

Lydia:

That was cheap and free. Really what ended up happening is in the 1930s and 1940s, American mission nurses, maybe we'll get into this, but they had this strong desire to advance the standards of nursing, to put nursing education on really high academic standards. So what they ended up doing is they went, they traveled around, they used all their furloughs, their like year off times after a certain period of time, like five years, they'd get a year off or after seven years they'd get a year off. They'd go back to the US And a lot of them took expanded studies in nursing. They developed their own expertise and some of them traveled around North America to see what were other nursing leaders doing. They went to Yale, they went to U of T, the big school in Toronto, in Toronto doing like innovative education work and nursing.

Lydia:

And they began to see, and the advice they got from these nursing leaders in North America was don't tie the nursing schools to the hospitals. Keep them separate. So in the forties and fifties they began to detach so that they would have control over their nursing school. And the physicians didn't have a say in how it was managed run. They had financial control over the school and it served them well, maybe we'll get into that. But it had a fascinating impact in terms of their longevity in Iran. Within the mission. They carved out an area of autonomy and expertise. They did that partly through their work. And then the second fascinating thing is within the space of healthcare in Iran, because they were starting these nursing schools and there really weren't any other, between 1916 and 1936, they really ran the only nursing schools in their country.

Lydia:

I found like a reference to one outlier that sort of existed, where an Iranian nurse who trained in Beirut came back and kind of started training two students. So not really a school, but some education going on. So they really had a monopoly on nursing education in Iran for like till 1936. And in 1936, when the government decided that it needed national nursing education, it was modern healthcare was expanding in Iran, there was a lot of trained physicians, no nurses, what do they do? So they decided to start these national nursing schools and they hired American nurses to do it. And this is so fascinating to me. Like they employed them, they were employed by the Iranian state to start these nursing schools. Eventually they started three of them. So in that way as well that their alliance with Iranian ministers of health and the state also enabled them to carve out this particular area of autonomy more broadly beyond the mission is kind of what I argue, if that makes sense.

Pat:

Well, it does. And also as I opened about the Shah in 1935 saying, we are now gonna be Iran. So you can imagine the context of this nationalizing and this awareness of their place in the world. It sounds like the nursing need, the nurses coming right time, right place historically. It seems like that's what you're kind of suggesting.

Lydia:

Yeah. And then on top of that, I think what, what I haven't talked about is one of the ways that they kind of aligned with the state nursing in particular is that they introduced an Americanized curriculum. But part of that was they were so strongly focused on promoting a professional nursing identity. And this took a variety of forms. You know, they all wore the same uniforms, caps, there were certain traditions that were implemented. There was capping ceremonies, graduation ceremonies. Some of what I write about is how they incorporated these history of nursing pageants into these ceremonies and celebrations. So they'd have the students dress up as Florence Nightingale. So they're connecting these students to a much broader international kind of idea of nursing. In addition, what this did actually and what, which aligned so well with the Shaw's plan for the nation. So all these students who came to these nursing schools were from extremely diverse religious, ethnic, linguistic class social backgrounds.

Lydia:

Like there was such a variety, like one class, there might be students who spoke six different languages were from four different religions who were from different class and educational backgrounds. So all these really diverse students came together. And then what the missionaries did so well is they really cultivated this uniform professional nursing identity. Like it brought them together. And I think that aligned really well with the state's objective. So the state at the time was really, Raza Shah was really interested in promoting one, one language. One culture, like trying to unify these really diverse, as you mentioned, these really diverse groups that existed within Iran for political purposes and to strengthen his own rule as well. But I think what they did through their schools is to help foster this commonality among women, which worked really well with the state's objectives. Is

Pat:

Your research is interesting in that it reveals that Iranian women were not passive recipients of this education. They used it strategically for their own advancement. So as you're talking about that, is there an example of an Iranian woman whose story in that regard has stayed with you?

Lydia:

Yeah, so there's a couple. So one thing I'll say is that, so they used it as you said, they use Iranian women use nursing education for a whole multitude of reasons for women from ethnic and religious minorities like a Syrian and Armenian women for example. Many of them used mission nursing to then immigrate to the United States. It was a pathway just as you know, others argue in terms of Filipino nursing or others that have been written about more broadly. But for them it really became a pathway to the US. And so I'll give one example from this and I'll give you some other examples. One of the women is Grace Sayad, who graduated from the nursing school in Armenia in 1930. And she worked for just three years in Iran at a mission hospital. I think she was like a supervisor of a ward or something in that mission hospital.

Lydia:

And she ended up getting married, but her and her husband during the first World War, they'd lost a lot of family. The Turkish army had advanced, they lost family members. There was a lot of chaos and destruction that followed their family. And so they had wanted for years to immigrate to the United States. So they ended up, I think it was the fifties, deciding to send Grace to the US. She had three kids, she was married, they sent her to the us. She had knew someone there who, how she could get a visa. She was sponsored. She got a job right away at, although it was as a nursing aid, Augustana Hospital in Chicago. And she worked until she had saved up enough money, I think it was six months or so. She worked, she saved up enough money so that she could sponsor her daughter and her husband to come to the United States.

Lydia:

And as soon as they came, she quit. And I think this is so interesting 'cause it's totally strategic. She used it right to get her family to the US to create this different life that they wanted. And she never went back to nursing again. And mission nursing allowed her to transfer those skills. She was taught American nursing subjects the same curriculum as uh, students in the US were being taught. So the same curriculum. And then it gave her the English skills, the ability to navigate the United States in terms of her ability to, uh, speak English and navigate with patients. So that's one example of a nurse. Her name is it's Grace Sayad. I think her son has written a book about their family more broadly. So that's one example. And then, so there's a, a whole bunch of ways Iranian women use nursing education.

Lydia:

Another really interesting thing is that because American nurses wanted, they wanted the profession to be founded on high educational standards. So girls education was pretty limited in Iran at the time. In some cities, for example, where nurses had their schools, they couldn't, even girls in the city could not even achieve like a sixth grade or sixth class education. Their ideal was to admit students who'd completed ninth class education. So in some of the cities like Hamadan, Rasht, I think they offered part of the secondary curriculum in their schools. So they'd admit the girls and then the girls would have to take the secondary curriculum first. And then after a year they'd move into the three year nursing program so that it would be four years in total that they'd have to do. And what they found is that some of the students so strategically were really probably just entering the nursing school.

Lydia:

Because they wanted the education because after the year long secondary curriculum, they would say, oh, I thought it was just, I thought nursing was just about book study. I don't actually want to care for patients. Or they might drop out after that first year. So they really wanted the education for those that who continued on. What's fascinating is that many of them ended up in leadership positions in healthcare. There was of course such a demand. There wasn't really any other nursing schools, training nurses. So they became in high demand, they became supervisors of hospitals. They started their own nursing schools. Some of them became involved in government. They were at, like at the Minister of Public Health, they were in those kind of public health departments in the government. So they had high prestigious roles. Iranian nurses were some of the first women to work outside the home. There was teachers and nurses. So they really were publicly active. They became politically active by 1979. It's so fascinating to see what happens with these nurses. Nurses, but they became politically active.

Pat:

I want to shift gears now. I wanna ask you about a phrase in your research that made me take note: "nursing imperialism." Now many people associate imperialism with conquest and domination, but these were women driven by compassion building schools and hospitals, training other Iranian women for the very first time. So how do these two different things coexist?

Lydia:

Yeah, it's really fascinating. I mean we think of imperialism that way. You're right, right? And so, I don't know, I've sometimes used the phrase soft imperialism, but really it's a form of cultural or professional imperialism. Because the model of nursing that they introduced was a completely American model. And so both in terms of the subjects they taught, which was an Americanized curriculum, you know, what was important in an American curriculum in terms of students learning particular subjects like that became what was taught in Iran. So it was kind of imposed in some ways the curriculum was imposed, but also in terms of like gendered ideas of care of who can provide care. I mean they really crafted this idea of nursing as women's work. They were very, they did a very good job of it. And so really I, I think this has a lot to do with their involvement in nursing education in Iran, that they framed it as a, for a while anyway, they eventually had to admit some men, but they framed it as a women's profession.

Lydia:

And so in that way as well, they're shaping ideas about women's work and about women's professional labor in Iran. And this is a form of imperialism plus. In addition to that, there's the religious connotations, which it's a little hard to figure out from the records. I don't know that they were super actively proselytizing to their students, though I'm sure some were. But they definitely framed nursing as religious work. So they began to argue, they kind of reframed the way that they spoke about nursing. And they said, well, nursing itself is service and service is like a Christian ideal. So when these students are engaging in nursing work, actually they're performing this Christian work just by virtue of serving others. And so they kind of took the ideals and framed it as Christian work and no doubt that that shaped, you know, the way that they were teaching their students and and so on as well.

Lydia:

So in that way as well. And then the other interesting kind of imperial, I guess, outcome of this is that it really did facilitate this pathway or this connection between US nursing and Iranian nursing. And I have started a bit to look at post-mission nursing, but in the Cold War era, at one point USAID was active in Iran. And I read somewhere in a little small statistic that USAID sponsored like 270 nurses from Iran to do training in the United States. So this is in the Cold War, you know, 1950s, 1960s or something in 1977. And so again, I think the fact that American nurses had been there shaped these longer connections shaped the US involvement in Iran. And actually the only reason that US and Iran had diplomatic relations in the first place was because missionaries were active in the country. It was a state representative in the US who had family members who were missionaries in Iran that advocated for diplomatic relations. And so what's interesting is a lot of scholars who look at US Iran relations look to the World War II or

Pat:

August 19th, 1953

Lydia:

When the US and Britain overthrow Mosaddegh. But really people do not look at this longer history of American missionary involvement in Iran. The American missionaries came in 1834. This was a huge long, extensive history in Iran. They shaped Iranians perceptions of America. And you know, I have a couple quotes their, their hospitals were known as the American Hospital, not even the Mission Hospital, the American hospital in the different cities. And there's a quote that I use in my book draft that says, this little girl came in with a wrist injury and she thought she was in America when she was brought to the, she had to have surgery on her wrist, but she thought she was in America. Like the hospital itself became kind of, they really did represent the United States to Iranians and they did a lot of educational work as well. So largely this might have been a positive image for many Iranians. So I think that opened the way for different waves of American influence in Iran that otherwise might not have happened. So there's an imperial connection there. I think even in terms of more formal diplomatic kind of more state directed initiatives in Iran that I think stemmed from this missionary project that nurses were part of.

Pat:

You talked about Mosaddegh, who was democratically elected and immediately moved to nationalize Iran's oil, taking it back from British control. Two years later in 1953, the CIA and British Intelligence orchestrated a coup removed mossek and restored the Shah to full power. The Shah signed over 40% of Iran's oil fields to American companies. So it's interesting, you've got parallel like this wonderful American influence, the nursing, the opportunities and those connections between the countries. The underbelly is the overthrow of Mosaddegh. So history's never clean. I mean in the sense it's messy. There's multiple layers, there's not a black and white. It's so filled with so many contradictions. Anybody who loves history knows that. And so I'm glad you brought that up because that was two running streams in this American Iranian connection. So your work from 1907 to 1979 and yes, I'm going there. 1979, the Iranian revolution.

Pat:

Now it is said that it was won by cassettes and Ayatollah Khomeini recorded his sermons and political speeches while living in exile. The cassette copies were cheaply duplicated and then smuggled into Iran. An official from Iran's government was moved to declare quote, tape cassettes are stronger than fighter planes. It became known as the cassette revolution. Now I have to tell you, Lydia, I watched all of this unfold in a very personal way. I had dear Iranian friends here in Minnesota who gave me daily human accounts of what was happening. The fear, uncertainty, and grief, watching their country crack open and become something unrecognizable. And then to watch the hostage crisis of 52 Americans held for 444 days, I felt that on both sides through the eyes of my Iranian friends who were heartbroken and terrified and through the eyes of those American families waiting and watching and praying, this was not some geopolitical abstraction. It was real. My question is, what happened to the American nurses, hospitals, schools, American influence post 1979? What happened to all that?

Lydia:

Yeah, it's, it's a fascinating story. So I mean essentially it ended, but I'll, I'll tell you a bit. So the mission nursing schools had been nationalized by the government in like the 1940s, I forget the exact year, around the 1940s. So the government had already started to nationalize some of the mission activities. It didn't nationalize the nursing schools were all the hospitals yet because it still used the services, it not didn't rely on them, but it capitalized on them and took advantage of what they were offering missionaries and there weren't enough nurses. So it was happy and as I said, it partnered with these nurses. But what ended up happening is that by 1965, the mission essentially ended. The hospitals that were left were nationalized. And I have some amazing photos of the children of missionaries who've sent me some of the hospitals and the new name, it's like the old mission hospital with the old name and the new, it's just amazing to see the parallels.

Lydia:

But the hospitals were nationalized by and large, the physicians were all left Iran, but mission nurses. So the mission ended, it was, there was no more mission but the foreign mission board, it had a new name by this point, but it continued to just sponsor or support missionary nurses independently. They were working at Iranian universities or for Iranian health bodies to support nursing education. So they were directly employed by the government but kind of still considered missionaries and kind of supported through the mission board at the time. And so they continued. So they were still active in Iran until 1979. Like it's amazing, I feel that this story continued. And so I think a lot of it had to do with some of their former students were probably the ones who were getting them or assisting them in finding these positions and working with them from what I can see, that's what kind of happened.

Lydia:

And so they were still active in the country until 1979, at which time with the revolution or soon after they exited Iran they had to leave and found ways to get out. And then after that, the kind of formal relationship between American nurses and Iranian nurses through the mission ended. But as I've seen in some of my other work, the pull of some Iranian nurses to continue to take nursing education in the US continued because I was just in Boston a couple weeks ago looking at the archives of just gonna share, this is gonna be my next project. But I was looking at Boston University School of Nursing, which sponsored all these nurses from Iran and other countries. But there was quite a number from Iran who were going to Boston University in the eighties even to take nursing education and then go back to Iran. So I just think there's a longer history, it wasn't missionaries anymore, but a longer history of connection between Iranian and American nursing that kind of continued. But anyway, so in 1979 the American nurses exited the country.

Pat:

So Lydia, given our world right now, what's happening? Why does this history matter?

Lydia:

Yeah, this is such a good question for me. Not global events, but for me I think what it really shows is one, how interconnected and international nursing was in the 20th century. And there's scholars who, as I say, look at Filipino nursing and nurses in these trans migratory kind of pathways and how interconnected nursing was. And I think it's so fascinating. Iran has never really entered the picture when sometimes when we talk about kind of international nursing literature. So I think it's important to kind of think about the role that these international nursing conversations had and how they played out in Iran. That's part of it. I think as well, nurses are often ignored in histories. Both histories of international like relations, histories of medicine. And so what's fascinating for the story in Iran is that nurses actually mattered a lot. Like they outlasted the physicians.

Lydia:

They had a longer connection to the Iranian state. And there's a scholar who writes about the development of modern medicine in Iran. So he's looking at Iranian physicians in the development of the profession. But in that he looks at how the state in the thirties, forties, fifties was regulating mission physicians, which is true. The state began to impose all these regulations. There was a series of laws that were passed that restricted where they could practice American missionary physicians where they could practice what kind of practice they could engage in like gynecology or nephrology or something. You know, it, it limited their practice. And this did not happen for nurses, but the scholar never looked at nurses. So he argues that the role of American missionaries in Iran was very marginal. It was like not important, it didn't really matter. But when you flip the gaze and look at nurses, actually no, it was really significant.

Lydia:

This, this history of American nursing in Iran was really significant in shaping nursing today, nursing in Iran and how it evolved, including as I've talked to students and so on, like American textbooks are sometimes still used in Iranian nursing schools. So there's these lingering connections. I think looking at nurses as a lens to consider international relations is also significant. So I hope that my work will point people to consider nurses as important players in both world events and international relations. I think they're pretty interesting to focus on and they're not so irrelevant sometimes as people think in these histories that get written.

Pat:

Beautifully said. And you kind of bring up something that runs through our conversation when it comes to nurses. It seems like nursing and nurses fly just under the radar of cultural awareness, popular culture. But to anyone who has ever been hospitalized, anyone who would interview those people who've had that hospital experience and say ask them who was there for you, who was very reassuring, who explained everything and it'll be the nurses. Oh my god, I can tell you about the nurses. I'm an artist. What the hell do I know about nursing? Okay. But, but I do know because I have been in a hospital. I do know that what delighted me about your work was how you elevated the awareness of what these women did and the place of nursing on a international level, on a humane level. My gosh. And so this is really important.

Lydia:

It's really fascinating 'cause I've presented my work sometimes at Iranian studies conferences and it's always so interesting 'cause the few times that I've done this internationally, like in Vienna once and so on, I've had people in the audience, Iranian scholars of other area, of other fields, you know, histories come up to me and be like, oh, I was a little boy and I used to like ride my bicycle past the American mission and like, or oh I was a, my mom used to work as the, you know, she did this and this in the hospital. Like generally, and I'm not saying the sentiment was entirely positive, but a lot of folks have really positive reflections on the work of missionaries and they did provide to thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of people, surgeries and medical care that people might otherwise not have had. When you ask about imperialism, it's definitely imperialism.

Lydia:

But also they provided these tangible social services as well that that nurses were part of, which is interesting. And the other thing I guess I can say is looking at nurses is so fascinating. So I have this article a student and I are working on it, she's Persian and we're not quite done, but I'll just share with you that we're looking at representations of nurses in Iranian film. And again, like it's been so fascinating because nurses were like used as, I think this is what we're gonna argue as kind of the people to critique current political dynamics. And I think they were a safe, what we argue is they were a liminal space or they were a safer kind of person persona to analyze some of these larger political dynamics. Including when one of the first movies was made where women were after the revolution where women appeared without a hijab.

Lydia:

It was this series where it was just in the background, it wasn't the main character, but there was a bus scene where some people in the back did not have a head covering. And it's this story about a nurse. And I really think that nursing allows for critique because it's kind of fits the patriarchy. You know, there's particular gendered in a particular way. They're kind, nurses are kind of seen as different to physicians still in popular culture in some ways. And so I think sometimes they're like a safe place or, or there's an ability to critique from the space of nurses. So anyway, I don't know what we'll do with that, but I think it's true for not just for their Iranian story too, of how nurses became really important in different cultural moments. But,

Pat:

Well Lydia, I could listen to you for a couple hours here. I mean I love this history. It's so multifaceted and I wanna thank you for coming on Fill To Capacity and and sharing this wealth of information. It's just been incredible. Thank you.

Lydia:

Thank you so much. It's been fantastic. I appreciate it.

Pat:

Now ordinarily I would end the podcast, but I want Rumi to have the last word: "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field, I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense." Okay, thank you and thank you listeners for joining us today. Take care. Bye bye.