"We have worked while we played and played while we worked": discipline and disobedience at the Kingston General Hospital Training School for Nurses, 1923-1939.

Drawing on evidence found in nurses' journals, oral accounts, yearbooks and other cultural productions as well as in hospital records, this paper considers the experiences of apprentices in a hospital nursing training school in the interwar period. By combining elements of scientific management with an older paternalist ethos, hospital administrators sought to imprint student nurse "material" with standards of work and behaviour valued by the hospital institution and the community that supported it. Students, whose expectations for nursing school often conflicted with those of management, developed a culture of mutuality that provided them with valuable resources to subvert and/or ameliorate the effects of disciplinary technologies and to re-appropriate the spaces and discourses of nursing training.