ABSTRACT
Traditional histories of nursing in Britain have focused on the professionalization of nursing and the role nursing reformers such as Florence Nightingale and Mrs Bedford Fenwick played in this process. In South Africa, there has been a similar emphasis on the ‘progressive’ reforms made by Sister Henrietta and her followers in the late nineteenth century. Revisionist historians have now challenged the traditional view which eulogizes the rise of a lily-white nursing profession from the ashes of Sarah Gamp.1 It is certainly true that the changes in nursing recruitment and training in the last quarter of the nineteenth century affected hospitals profoundly and there were major conflicts with doctors over the growing power of nurses and the administrative changes the new nursing sisters pressed for in the hospitals. But insofar as the introduction of state registration was an important positive influence on the status and material rewards of nursing at all-a matter of some debate-it may have done so at the expense of a patient-centred approach to healing and nurses’ independence, creating exploitation, subservience and dependence of nurses.2
