‘But Why Nursing?’

Abstract

‘But why nursing?’ Over the past few years, expressions ranging from polite disinterest to total incredulity have generally greeted my declaration that I have been working on this history. The question itself reveals the public image: worthy, boring, taken for granted and virtually invisible. So the question seems an appropriate starting point for an introduction. Part of the answer — as so often in research — lies in accident. In the early 1980s when Dr Neil Andersson and I were completing our WHO monograph, Health and Apartheid,¹ we became aware that very little had been written about women’s health or women as the providers of health services in South Africa. We planned a book on the subject, and I went off to the South African archives as the first stage of our research and tapped ‘women and health’ into the computer. This produced the title of one file: ‘Women of Pretoria complain of the effects on their health of the local native location’; however, the contents had been destroyed. Clearly some lateral thought was necessary, so I tried ‘Nursing’.