ABSTRACT
Mental health nurses have been ill served by historians. Virtually ignored by writers both in the field of nursing and that of psychiatry, they appear to have been judged to be not part of the health-care system for all of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. A number of reasons might be put forward to explain why mental health nurses have been thus consigned to the historical side-lines. Salvage 1 suggests that they have been overlooked because they worked in isolated institutions, apart from the mainstream practitioners of medicine and nursing. Florence Nightingale herself regarded asylum nurses as on a par with the least important domestic servants, and gave neither their training nor their work any recognition when the School of Nursing at St Thomas’s Hospital was established in 1860. Her great ally, Mrs Bedford Fenwick, was equally adamant that asylum nurses were not ‘real nurses’, but rather a part of the penal system, more concerned with confining people than caring for them.
