Marlene Orton
The time Cynthia Toman spent in hospital critical care wards – nearly 30 years – has long passed. Today she is a leading Canadian historian in the field of military nursing.
Her doctoral thesis on the Second World War Canadian military nurses, known by rank as Nursing Sisters, has earned her a Governor General's Gold Medal. An assistant professor of nursing at the University of Ottawa, Toman also consults for the Canadian War Museum and the Canadian Museum of Civilization on upcoming nursing history exhibits.
Toman graduated in nursing in 1970 from Virginia's Eastern Mennonite University, married a Canadian and has nursed in Canada most of her career. She began teaching nursing at the University in 1990, soon deciding to enhance her qualifications.
“I loved working with nursing students,” she says. “So I went back to complete a Master of Science in Nursing. Initially I planned to do quantitative clinical research until I took a graduate course in the history of nursing. I felt like I was coming home to something I never knew was a research method for my field.”
She loved historical research and began work with her long-time mentor Meryn Stuart, associate professor of nursing whose expertise includes the history of women and their professions. Toman's master's thesis dealt with the history of blood transfusion as a medical technology and its delegation from physicians to nurses.
Her doctoral studies took her deeper into historical research. She took history courses while applying to the doctoral program, including a graduate seminar on the Canadian fur trade, which proved something of a culture shock for a ward nurse. “I almost dropped the course,” says Toman. But she was hooked by the time she finished the final paper in which she analyzed health care in a Hudson's Bay Company trading post.
Armed with a two-year award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Toman conducted oral history interviews, dug into military personnel files and searched archival records related to military nurses from every Armed Forces branch and every setting – including field surgical units, hospital ships, casualty clearing stations, and convalescent hospitals in Canada.
Her research examined Nursing Sisters as women, soldiers, and nurses who expanded their responsibilities while serving ever closer to the frontlines of war and the frontiers of medical technology. “It allowed me to question the relationship between war and the introduction of new medical technology into health care.”
