How did skilled nursing practice develop to become an essential part of the modern health system? This book provides some important answers to this question. It traces the history and development of nursing practice in Europe and North America, exploring two broad categories of nursing work: the 'hands-on' clinical work of nurses in hospitals and the work of nurses in public health, which involved health screening, health education and public health crisis management. The book contains rich case studies of nursing practice across diverse settings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As well as examining 'what nurses did', it explores the significance and meaning of nursing work, for nurses themselves, their patients and their communities, and examines developments in practice against a backdrop of social, cultural, political and economic drivers and constraints.

This book will be of interest to academics and clinical nurses alike. It is also an ideal textbook for undergraduate nursing programmes, providing students with rich accounts of the history of their own disciplinary practice.

Introduction: Histories of nursing practice - Christine Hallett, Gerard Fealy
Part I: Care and cure in nursing work
1. Baby and infant healthcare in Dresden, 1897-1930 - Bettina Blessing
2. The taste of war: the meaning of food to New Zealand and Australian nurses far from home in World War One, 1915-18 - Pamela J. Wood and Sara Knight
3. 'In the company of those similarly afflicted': the sanatorium patient and sanatorium nursing, c.1908-52 - Martin S. McNamara and Gerard Fealy
4. 'Hurting and caring': nursing burned children in the Chicago School fire disaster, 1958 - Barbara Brodie
5. A poverty of leadership: nursing older people in English hospitals, 1945-80 - Jane Brooks
6. Beyond the cuckoo's nest: Nurses and ECT in Dutch psychiatry, 1940-2010 - Geertje Boschma
Part II: Public health and nursing work
7. The cholera epidemic of 1892 and its impact on modernising public health and nursing in Hamburg - Mathilde Hackmann
8. 'Some kindred form of medical social work': defining the boundaries of social work, health visiting, public health nursing in Europe, 1918-25 - Jaime Lapeyre
9. 'Community health care': Struggles and conflicts of an emerging public health system in the United States, 1915-45 - Rima Apple
10. Nurses in schools, coal towns and migrant camps: bringing health care to rural America, 1900-50 - John Kirchgessner, Arlene Keeling and Mary Gibson
Index

Editors

Gerard M. Fealy is Professor of Nursing and Associate Dean for Research at the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health Systems, University College Dublin

Christine E. Hallett is Professor of Nursing History at the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, University of Manchester, and is Director of the UK Centre for the History of Nursing

Susanne Malchau Dietz is Historian in Residence at the Danish Museum of Nursing History, Kolding, Denmark