Fonds consists of constitution and by-law files, minutes, hospital files, correspondence, reports, history and archive files, briefs and submissions, publications and subject files, 1873-1972. The collection also contains b&w prints and negatives of nurses, mostly unidentified, from the Victorian Order of Nurses for Canada, [1920-1955]; and a copy of a 1898 group photo of members of the Victorian Order of Nurses who accompanied the Yukon Field Force to the Yukon.
Victorian Order of Nurses for Canada : Organized by Lady Aberdeen in 1897 in commemoration of Queen Victoria's Jubilee, the Victorian Order of Nurses for Canada serves as a branch nursing service to supply well qualified nurses for the sick who are otherwise unable to obtain them. The first branches were organized in Ottawa, Montreal, Kingston and Vancouver. To serve communities in sparsely populated areas of western and northern Canada, Cottage Hospitals were organized by the Order, some 44 such hospitals being established between 1898 and 1924, when the last of these hospitals was taken over by local authorities. The Order had by then increasingly turned to providing visiting nurses for farming districts, with nurses frequently covering great distances on horseback and sled to make house calls.
With the coming of the official public health nursing organizations and municipal hospitals, especially after World War II, the Victoria Order increasingly withdrew from country areas to the more densely populated centres, where they endeavour to meet the special requirements of patients who do not need, or cannot afford, the full-time services of a nurse, or who for various reasons cannot, or need not, go into hospital. The Victorian Order of Nurses for Canada has also been active during times of emergencies, serving the sick during the Typhoid epidemic in the Klondike, 1898, and nursing the wounded following the Halifax Explosion, 1917. The Victorian Order of Nurses also served the Canadian Armed Forces during both World Wars.
