A quiet revolution has been sweeping through the writing of nursing history over the last decade. Nursing history has been transformed from an internalist and triumphant form of professional apologetics to a robust and reflective area of scholarship.

The fifteen international contributors to this book look at nursing from different perspectives, as it has been developed under different regimes and ideologies and at different times in America, Australia, Britian, the Phillipines and South Africa. They highlight the role of politics and gender in understanding nursing history and the part that history has to play in the education of nurses today.