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In recent years, there has been increased interest in the role of religion in the reform of nursing during the mid-nineteenth century. However, less is known about how ‘party’ disputes between evangelicals and followers of the ‘Oxford Movement’ may have affected nursing. This study examines a proposal to create a nursing association for the Diocese of Lichfield in 1864, which leads to a public dispute concerning the ‘ecclesiastical’ nature of the organisation. Leading evangelicals in Derby campaigned against the idea of nurses belonging to a ‘sisterhood’. This resulted in two rival organisations being created in 1865. This paper reports upon the nature and origins of the dispute within the diocese, unsuccessful attempts to draw Florence Nightingale into the dispute and the relative success of the two institutions. The results of this research indicate that the importance of context and of place must be recognised when studying the history of nursing. This research is based mainly, upon newspaper reports, correspondence and miscellaneous sources, including biographies as there are few surviving records from the two organisations under scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on research in progress focusing on the histories of mission hospitals in the rural communities of KwaZulu Natal, while also building on earlier research into the pluralism of medical systems within the South African Cape. Sources have been drawn from a range of historical documents, including medical and nursing journals, the archives of a number of medical missionary societies and of the Overseas Nursing Association, but the research has also been informed by oral histories of a broad cross-section of health professionals who practised in South Africa. A large literature search included a number of biographies and institutional histories. The paper will be divided into three parts--the first provides a brief background to colonialism and the early nursing history of South Africa; the second looks in more detail at the role played by missionary nurses in establishing nursing as a profession and providing training opportunities for African nurses. The final part contrasts missionary nursing with the supply of, and work done by nurses from the Overseas Nursing Association operating within their quite specific, colonial remit. This will show how the two contrasting professional spheres--one reflecting a fairly short-term commitment, the other, a much broader, 'vocational' involvement--may be seen to represent quite different colonial attitudes, and ultimately quite diverse outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) came to power in 1933, the new Nazi government focused the German health system on their priorities such as the creation of a racially homogeneous society and the preparation of war. One of the measures to bring nursing under their control was the foundation of a new sisterhood. In 1934, Erich Hilgenfeldt (1897-1945), the ambitious head of the National Socialist People's Welfare Association (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt), founded the National Socialist (NS) Sisterhood (Nationalsozialistische Schwesternschaft) to create an elite group that would work for the goals of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP). Hilgenfeldt proclaimed community nursing as a priority for NS Sisterhood nurses. Catholic and Protestant sisters, who were traditionally dedicated to community nursing, were to be gradually replaced. However, other competing priorities, such as hospital service for the training of junior nurses and work in conquered regions, as well as the lack of NS nursing personnel, hampered the expansion of community nursing. The paper also addresses areas for future research: everyday activities of NS nurses, the service of NS Sisterhood nurses for NSDAP organisations such as the elite racist paramilitary force SS (Schutzstaffel, Protective Squadron), and involvement in their crimes have hardly been investigated as yet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories of nursing that disregard their linkage to broader historical movements often lead to historically detached versions of nursing identity that omit the perspective of their sources and the ideas of their time. Drawing on materials retrieved through a multilayered research strategy comprising internal and external sources, this article examines the development of a nursing identity in Chile during the period starting in the 1950s through the early 2000s. We analysed the sociopolitical contexts in which the nursing profession grew, the changing direction of its role and how the nursing identity transformed itself. Through the use of historical sources and oral testimonies, we aim to give a nuanced account of how the history of public health and that of the country more broadly changed the object of identification of nurses, creating only relatively recently a sense of nursing community. Processes of identification, fragmentation and integration are highlighted, which challenge usual notions of history as a linear process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]