Reading nursing history

This paper undertakes a reading of nursing history as a constituent discourse. The discursive power of history, with its active mining of the archives of the past to construct a narrative of contemporary force and power, is emphasized. The essay begins with the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century professional histories that celebrated nursing's evolutionary achievements. It then moves to the sociologically influenced revisions of the 1960s, and the feminist and critical revisions of the 1980s and 1990s. We then turn to recent scholarship and examine the call for nursing history to participate in the theoretical construction of the discipline of nursing. The observation is made that, in the name of relevance, contemporary nursing history appears to be expected to contribute to the development of nursing knowledge, just as early histories contributed to the professionalization of nursing. The teleological assumptions of both nursing history and nursing theory are then argued to set the limits of nursing discourse, with detrimental effect on scholarship.