[Nurses in immaculate white: an empty page in Dutch historiography?]

Until recently, the historiography of nursing in England and the Netherlands was written from a traditional, 'Whig-history' perspective. While focussing on famous leaders and examples such as Florence Nightingale in England and Jeltje de Bosch Kemper in the Netherlands, it told historical events in a chronological, narrative manner. The publication of a collection of essays by Celia Davies, entitled Rewriting nursing history (1980), which used new sources, theories and methods from the social sciences, while advocating a comparative approach, produced a revolution in the writing of nursing history in the Anglo-American world. This revolution resulted in a steady flow of publications on all aspects of the history of nursing. When compared to these Anglo-American developments, the Dutch writing of nursing history still lags behind. Although in the 1980s both medical history and womans history provided stimuli for a new orientation, a real break-through has not yet occurred. Central to an explanation of the backlog of Dutch historiography in this respect, is, it would seem, the rather late official recognition of nursing as an academic discipline, which only occurred in 1980.