ABSTRACT
Autobiographies and biographies of nurses can be found on the shelves of many public libraries in Britain. Written for a general readership, many of these accounts contain detailed descriptions of the day-to-day practicalities of living and working as a nurse in various spheres of professional practice. What might these (auto)biographies contribute to our knowledge of nursing history? Christopher Maggs argues that nursing history helps furnish the detail of political, economic and social history but has yet to generate its own conceptual statements about nursing and caring.1 It is almost as though history and nursing are separate, and that studies of the history of nursing bear no relationship to theories about nursing or caring. Maggs is interested in how an exploration of the historical landscape might aid the construction (reconstruction and destruction) of nursing or caring models. He suggests that if nursing history is to contribute to the development of nursing knowledge, we have to investigate ʻthe world of the patient and the world of care [that] remain[s] largely hidden from viewʼ.2 This study explores the contribution nursing (auto)biographies can make to what Maggs productively suggests might be termed a history of caring by revealing not only the institutional and social development of nursing as a profession but the skills, knowledge and ethos of everyday nursing practice.
