Emerging Scholarship in Nursing History

Abstract

These are dynamic times for nursing history in Canada, as this special issue of the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History demonstrates. Twenty years ago, scholars sought to create one professional identity and one homogenous historical story while current historians of nursing understand that profession to be more diverse and more complex. Emerging scholarship situates itself increasingly within mainstream histories and the subfield of women's history. The articles and book reviews represent a wide range of research interests and approaches, as well as regions outside of Ontario and central Canada. They reveal increasing diversity of primary sources, increasing use of analytical concepts, and fascinating new directions for analyzing practice as authors address questions such as: Who could legitimately claim to be a nurse, what is nursing practice, and what is health care? While these trends are encouraging, significant gaps remain in nursing historiography, and nursing practice continues to be ignored or marginalized with the wider body of health care historiography.