Nursing's Long History of Mutual Aid

The doctrine of mutual aid and its application to nursing has recently enjoyed considerable attention in the pages of Nursing Philosophy. However, this is not the first time that nursing theorists have identified its salience to nursing. In 1907, Adelaide Nutting and Lavinia Dock specified mutual aid as the evolutionary impulse upon which the activity of nursing is founded. Nutting and Dock adopted mutual aid from Peter Kropotkin's application of Russian evolutionary theory to anarchism. Russian natural scientists argued that Darwin had overemphasised struggle and under-emphasised cooperation in his theory of natural selection. Just as Kropotkin sought to uncover the mundane relations of mutual support that were the bedrock of species' success, Nutting and Dock aimed to bring to light the unsung history of nursing's crucial contribution to humanity through its enactment of mutual aid in healthcare. They took a gendered approach, which assumed that the ability to engage in mutual aid was a function of the capacity to care which, in turn, was more developed in women. They also took a reformist approach in contrast to their anarchist contemporaries, who advocated revolution. After addressing contemporary dilemmas about the purpose and possibility of mutual aid, the articulation of Nutting and Dock's feminism with difference and neo-Darwinian feminisms are noted. In examining the relationship of their approach with contemporary ecological theory, Nutting and Dock's evolutionary grounding for mutual aid is compared favourably with contemporary anarchism's exclusively political approach, though both are excessively human-centred. It is concluded that the most important message we can take from Nutting and Dock is that survival depends on mutual aid and that nurses have the potential to be key actors in its instantiation.