Named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2001 by Choice

Why turn to the past when attempting to build nursing's future?...To make good decisions in planning nursing's future in the context of our complex health care system, nurses must know the history of the actions being considered, the identities and points of view of the major players, and all the stakes that are at risk. These are the lessons of history."
-- from the Introduction

This book presents nursing history in the context of problems and issues that persist to this day. Issues such as...

This new interpretation of the history of nursing in the United States captures the many ways women reframed the most traditional of all gender expectations--that of caring for the sick--to create new possibilities for themselves, to renegotiate the terms of some of their life experiences, and to reshape their own sense of worth and power.

For much of modern U.S. history, nursing was informal, often uncompensated, and almost wholly the province of female family and community members. This began to change at the end of the nineteenth century when the prospect of formal training...

2014 winner of the American Association for the History of Nursing's Mary M. Roberts Award for Exemplary Historical Research and Writing

The Routledge Handbook on the Global History of Nursing brings together leading scholars and scholarship to capture the state of the art and science of nursing history, as a generation of researchers turn to the history of nursing with new paradigms and methodological tools.

Inviting readers to consider new understandings of the...