Abstract

MARTINEZ POZO, María. Being a nurse in the "Hunger Years". Index Enferm [online]. 2004, vol.13, n.47, pp.54-58. ISSN 1699-5988.

Amelia Ros, a children's nurse, gives us the opportunity of getting to know through her biographic story the recent nurse's history, the one that can be remembered through the people that lived it. We are talking about the nursing in the Spanish post civil war. Our informant guides us through an expression of the care profession that wouldn't make sense if we don't locate it in the context where it took place. For that reason, she emphasizes the core values of the profession, how being a nurse was a vocation, it was to accomplish a duty, and how giving care was considered as something sacred. The fields in which she acted are also described. At those times nurses considered that sanitary and social services were linked, it was something indivisible due to the economic and social context of Spain in the forties (the hunger years, as she describes it). With her story I would like to acknowledge nurses of those times that faced so many difficulties and that served to advance in the women and nurse history thanks to their jobs and her personal work.