ABSTRACT
A quiet revolution has been sweeping through the writing of nursing history over the past decade. Two new journals, The International History of Nursing Journal and Nursing History Review attest to this trend. Nursing history is slowly being transformed from an internalist and triumphalist form of professional apologetics to a robust and reflective area of scholarship. It is attracting attention and research interest from a broad spectrum of scholars drawn from women’s history, labour history, history of medicine, sociology and, of course, nursing itself. The collection presented here reveals the increasingly gender and politically aware perspectives that are emerging from the cross-fertilization of ideas and interdisciplinary and international contact between social historians of medicine, nursing, historians of gender and the politics of welfare. It demonstrates the important contribution that historians of nursing can make to setting a new intellectual and political agenda for nurses, one in which the politics of nursing and welfare can fuse and flourish.
