History for a practice profession

This essay explores the meaning of history for a practice profession. It argues that our clinical backgrounds suggest particular kinds of historical questions that colleagues with different backgrounds would not think to ask. This essay poses three possible questions as examples. What if we place the day after day work of caring for the sick - that which is nursing - at the center of an institution's history? What if we were to embrace a sense of nurses and nursing work as truly diverse and different? What if we were to analytically engage the reluctance of the large number of nurses to formally embrace feminism? This essay acknowledges that these are not the only possible questions and, in the end, they most likely will not even be the important ones. But this essay does argue that we, who are both clinicians and historians, need to more seriously consider the implications of our questions for disciplinary practice and research. It argues, in the end, that the meaning of history to a practice profession lies in our questions: questions that are different than those raised by other methods, and questions that may escape notice in the press of daily practice and research.