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"Florence Nightingale and the medical men - working together for health care reform" by Lynn McDonald is a well-researched assessment of Florence Nightingale's collaborations with members of the British medical profession. McDonald's work provides a nuanced understanding of Nightingale's contributions to both civilian and military healthcare, challenging previous historical scholarship and offering correctives to simplistic interpretations. The book explores Nightingale's relationships with military medical officers, her public health collaborations, and her role in mediating the relationship between nursing and medicine. McDonald's analysis of Nightingale's attitudes towards nurse-registration and germ theory is particularly impressive. Overall, the book is a valuable contribution to the fields of nursing and medical history and will be of interest to researchers, students, and anyone interested in Nightingale's work in the medical realm. [Extracted from the article]

Fully-trained professional nurses worked on hospital ships during the First World War, caring for the wounded during their transfer from the Gallipoli Peninsula to military hospitals on the Island of Lemnos and in Egypt. Many wrote accounts of their experiences, including diaries, official narratives for inclusion in Arthur Butlers ‘Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, 1914–1918’, and published memoirs. The paper explores the mythical prism through which they interpreted their experiences. Following an analysis of the ‘romance trope' upon which they drew, the paper identifies themes of ‘ordeal’ and ‘struggle’ which formed the central elements of their writings. It also identifies the ambivalence inherent in these writings, which focus on both the ‘heroism’ of soldier-patients and the pressures nurses appear to have felt to behave ‘heroically’ themselves. It concludes that behind the lines of nurses’ narratives there is a sense that, in doing such extraordinary work, these women believed they were both carving out an identity for themselves as female professionals on a world stage, and discovering their own strength and power as individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Trade union attitudes towards European immigrants have rarely been studied in a post-war context. As a response to this, this article focuses on trade union reactions to European workers in the Lancashire cotton industry between 1946 and 1951. Highlighting the merits of local case studies of labour relations, the focus is predominantly on the Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton Spinners and Twiners. Evidence is presented of a defensive attitude on the part of the Association that limited the number of European workers in individual mills, as well as acting as a barrier to such workers advancing into the echelons of skilled labour. The paper recognises, however, the complexities of the period, characterised as much by the consequences of capitalism and the decline of the cotton industry, as trade union jingoism. It also alludes to the conflicts that existed between individual districts and Executive Committees, between negotiated agreements and circumstances at individual mills and between employers and labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a CCETSW workshop external assessors and examiners looked at the contribution they could make to promoting anti-racist practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]