During the COVID-19 pandemic, Filipino nurses accounted for 25-33% of nurse deaths, although Filipinos are only 4% of the nursing workforce and 1% of the U.S. population. How did this come to be? Their disproportionate mortality in hospitals and long-term care homes underscores a history of uneven labor migration and exposure to workplace risks. More broadly, their deaths raise the persisting specter of American imperialism over the Filipino government, education, economic, and healthcare sectors, dating back to the U.S. colonial period in the Philippines from the 1890s until World War II. The violence during this period, however, remains obscured by discourses of care tied to American benevolence and modern nursing’s cultural association with altruism. Ren Capucao’s talk on February 24 will delve into the underbelly of care by foregrounding the subjectivities and lived experiences of Filipino nurses, who variously accepted, resisted, or succumbed to the standards and strains of a racialized modernity. He will discuss these nurses’ agency amidst the institutionalization of nursing in the Philippines and the racialization of Filipinos’ caring ability.
Dr. Ren Capucao is a nurse-historian and postdoctoral research associate affiliated with the Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry at the University of Virginia, where he also earned his BA, MSN, and PhD. As a U.S. Fulbright scholar at the University of the Philippines College of Nursing, he co-authored the book Saving Lives, Raising Standards: The History of UP Nursing, which illustrates the role of the University of the Philippines, from U.S. colonization to the COVID-19 pandemic, in the national development of the nursing profession. His research and teaching approach the modern history of nursing and healthcare in the Philippines and the United States through a comparative and transnational lens. Through the study of Filipino nurses, he depicts how the success of normative assimilation remains bound to oppressive structures that maintain social inequality, induce vulnerability and risk, and wear down physical and mental health.
To watch Dr. Capucao’s Department of Medicine Grand Rounds talk “Adiós Muchacho, Hello Nurse: Efficiency at the Philippine General Hospital, 1898–1916” on Tuesday, February 24, at 12 p.m., use the “virtual meeting click to watch” link on the Medicine Grand Rounds homepage. Join the evening C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society lecture “White-Capped Dreams: The (Dis)appearance of Filipino Men Nurses Under the Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945” on Tuesday, February 24, at 7 p.m., via Zoom (meeting ID: 95416747886). You can learn more at the C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society website.
Falk Library of the Health Sciences has several resources related to nursing in the Philippines. This photograph of a class of nurses graduating from the Philippine General Hospital is featured in the classic book on the history of Filipino nurses in the United States Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History by Catherine Ceniza (2003). To learn more, check out the collection Men in Nursing: History, Challenges, and Opportunities (2007), edited by Chad E. O’Lynn and Russell E. Tranbarger. Falk Library also holds two decades of The Philippine Journal of Nursing (1975-1996). Finally, did you know that the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing has an award-winning Men In Nursing Club (MINC)?
~Summary by guest contributor Kristen Ann Ehrenberger, Secretary of the C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society