ABSTRACT

The science, art and craft of nursing, and the nurse ʻherselfʼ, touch and have touched almost all lives wherever they are lived. Nurses, most of them women, are more numerous than their colleagues who practise medicine. It would seem that the history of nursing is uniquely placed to contribute to the mainstream history of health care and women. Yet nurses and their work have attracted scant attention from historians of medicine and health and, until very recently, from feminist historians. Nurses rarely emerge in accounts of pioneering medicine and were awarded little space in the histories of hospitals.