ABSTRACT
People have always cared for sick children at home. Prior to the early beginnings of children’s nursing in the nineteenth century, they would have been cared for by their mothers, female relatives or, as Versluysen (1980) has persuasively argued, ‘women healers’. Caring has been seen as a ‘virtue’ since pre-Christian times, for, as Baly (1987) reminds us, Thucydides writing about the plague that visited Athens in 429 BC refers to the fact that people visited and cared for the sick in their own homes and in doing so lost their own lives.
