Anatomia

Nursing Inquiry 2006; 13(4): 242– 248

Feature

History for a practice profession
Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Patricia D’Antonio Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, Philadelphia, USA Accepted for publication 6 September 2006

D’ANTONIO P. Nursing Inquiry 2006; 13: 242–248 History for a practice profession This essayexplores the meaning of history for a practice profession. It argues that our clinical backgrounds suggest particular kinds of historical questions that colleagues with different backgrounds would not think to ask. This essay poses three possible questions as examples. What if we place the day after day work of caring for the sick — that which is nursing — at the center of an institution’shistory? What if we were to embrace a sense of nurses and nursing work as truly diverse and different? What if we were to analytically engage the reluctance of the large number of nurses to formally embrace feminism? This essay acknowledges that these are not the only possible questions and, in the end, they most likely will not even be the important ones. But this essay does argue that we, who are bothclinicians and historians, need to more seriously consider the implications of our questions for disciplinary practice and research. It argues, in the end, that the meaning of history to a practice profession lies in our questions: questions that are different than those raised by other methods, and questions that may escape notice in the press of daily practice and research. Key words: clinicalpractice, historical methods, history.

On one never-to-be-forgotten Friday morning, my dissertation defense of an institutional case study of the Friends Asylum for the Insane in early nineteenth century Philadelphia was coming to a close. My dissertation topic was not an immediately obvious nursing topic — nor did I want it to be. I had cut my historical teeth reading such historians asAbel-Smith (1960), Melosh (1982), Maggs (1983), Reverby (1987), and Lynaugh (1989, 1990). I deliberately went as far afield as possible to avoid writing anything that might be tainted with the critique of conventional or, in Celia Davies’ words, ‘broad brush’ nursing history (Davies 1980, 11). I was determined to create a piece of research that would be of interest to historians both with and withoutclinical backgrounds, and that would hold its own against such historical case studies as Anne Digby’s (1985) of the York Retreat in England or Nancy Tomes’s (1984) of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane in the United States.

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But with less than 5 minutes left until freedom, a member of my committee leaned back in his seatand asked the one question for which I was completely unprepared. ‘Tell me’, he said, ‘how has your background as a nurse influenced how you told your story.’ I mumbled some sort of response, but I was, in fact, very annoyed with the question. My approach to my data, I believed then, was only as a historian; I wanted to be judged as a historian, and my clinical background had nothing to do withanything. Yet when I returned and re-read my dissertation I discovered, to my surprise, that, in fact, my clinical background had everything to do with my research. It influenced the kinds of questions I asked when I placed the day-after-day, weekin-week-out work of caring for the insane — that which is nursing — at the center of my institution’s history. It influenced how I thought about my data:how I thought about families who presented nineteenth-century staff not just with the dilemmas of caring for insane kin, but also with solutions that carried substantive cultural weight. It influenced how I thought about patients — patients who sometimes could but most often could not or would not share with their families

© 2006 The author. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd...