Ghost of the past: capturing history and the history of nursing

Historians of nursing are presented with the formidable task of attempting to decipher the history of a group about whom the documents are scarce, and who have rarely, if ever, written about themselves. It can be rather like a lottery searching through archives for documentary evidence, the task is hardly more tractable when the archival material does not exist. It is hard enough to decipher the ideas of our predecessors, virtually impossible when these ideas were written by some other than to whom they refer. This, it could be argued, prevents historians of nursing from undertaking the sort of history expounded by the followers of the positivist tradition, including Geoffrey Elton. For Elton, the documents were everything, and that they above all else should be the point of focus, if they do not exist how can a history of nursing be attempted at all. In 1961 Edward Hallett Carr's, What is History? was published. Richard Evans 36 years later argues that the question is not so much 'What is history?', but 'Is it possible to do history at all?'. In this paper the aim is to identify the difficulties in doing historical research, and also ask a third question, 'What or whom is history for?'