Overview

Editor:

Colin A Holmes
School of Nursing Services
James Cook University, Townsville, QLD

 The history of nursing and midwifery in Australia, New Zealand and adjacent areas remains largely unexplored and unwritten. Since the principal 'product' of historical research is greater understanding, it is likely to be further marginalized as academic institutions increasingly focus on research income and marketable outputs. For many individuals, therefore, studying the history of nursing and midwifery is a labour of love, over and above their normal workload.

The History of Nursing and Midwifery in Australasia special issue in Advances in Contemporary Nursing is a well researched response to this lack, and informs on:

• Socio-cultural and political aspects of nursing and midwifery as professionals 
• Education, regulation and professionalisation of nurses and midwives
• Specific nursing and midwifery practices such as bandaging, counseling, ward management
• Clinical specialties and services to specific communities, such as Indigenous people, shipboard, prisoners, occupational groups, and defence forces
• Services in specific locations, such as city centres, remote areas, off-shore, missions, war zones and areas of conflict
• Issues related to conducting, writing and publishing nursing and midwifery history

This special issue is an invaluable resource for nursing educators, researchers and practitioners, particularly in light of the scarcity of research that exists on the history of midwifery in Australia. 

Table of Contents

FOREWORD: Historical enquiry and understanding our past - Colin A Holmes

The 'order of things': Tracing a history of the present through a re-reading of the past in nursing education - KimWalker and Colin A Holmes

Bowlby's children: The forgotten revolution in Australian children's nursing - JeanetteWood

Looking to the future: Early twentieth-century school nursing in Queensland - Wendy Madsen

Governing nursing: Curriculum as a rhetorical vehicle using South Australian nursing schools from the 1950s onwards as an illustrative case - Mayumi Kako and Trudy Rudge

Midwifery in New Zealand 1904-1971 - Jane Stojanovic

Professional, practice and political issues in the history of New Zealand's remote rural 'backblocks' nursing: The case of Mokau, 1910-1940 - Pamela JWood

Gender and class tensions between psychiatric nurses and the general nursing profession in mid-twentieth century New Zealand - Kate Prebble and Linda Bryder

BOOK REVIEWS

Notes on Nursing:What It Is and What It Is Not, by F Nightingale (Commemorative Edition) - Barbara Hayes

The Nurse Apprentice, 1860-1977 (History of Medicine in Context), by Ann Bradshaw - Colin A Holmes

NOTICEBOARD

OrdinaryWomen, Extraordinary Lives - A pictorial history of Tasmanian Bush Nursing 1910-1957 - Marita Bardenhagen