Editor’s Note

As this is my first volume as editor, my first job is to thank my predecessor, Dr. Arlene Keeling, for all her excellent work. It is tough taking over from someone who has done so much for nursing history in general and for Nursing History Review (NHR) specifically. I hope that I can do justice to her legacy during my tenure. I also would like to thank Dr. Christine Hallett, who was the previous associate editor. Like Arlene, Christine’s work in the history of nursing needs no introduction; her retirement from NHR is a loss to the community. Despite the departure of Arlene and Christine, I am very lucky with the new editorial team. Dr. Michelle Hehman, who was the previous assistant editor, has been appointed associate editor and Dr. Erin Spinney is the new assistant editor. Michelle has been able to provide valuable continuity on the editorial board along with Drs. Annemarie McAllister and Lydia Wytenbroek, as the book and media editors, respectively, and Doris Rikkers, the managing editor. My thanks to them all for their ongoing support and work.When I was appointed, I decided to make a few changes to NHR. First, we reduced the word count for manuscripts in line with comparable peer-reviewed journals. The limit is now between 7,500 and 12,000 words. This has in no way reduced the quality of the submissions, as you will read in the published articles in this volume. Second, we have instituted a student section. This section is open to all graduate students and those within three years of completion of their degree. The word limit for this section is between 4,000 to 5,000 words. I hope that this will encourage neophyte historians of nursing to publish in NHR. The third change was to establish a special section each year. I was hoping that this volume would publish work based on the inclusion of nursing history in the curriculum. Unfortunately, the short turnaround time from research to manuscript submission has meant this was not possible. I hope that this theme can be featured next year. We also decided that the special section “Hidden in Plain Sight” was no longer needed. When Arlene introduced it, she hoped the articles included in the section would bring to the fore the diverse community of nursing and our rich history in all its colors, creeds, ethnicity, and gender, thus correcting the impression that nurses were and indeed still are primarily single, white, and female. As this volume demonstrates, diversity is now an expectation for both readers and authors and is the norm in the discipline. Finally, we have reintroduced keynote lectures and methodological papers.The articles published in this volume do, I hope, reflect the multiplicity of nursing history scholarship and the changes that I wish to make. The first article by Professors Odette Best and Tracey Bundy is based on Best’s 2022 Royal College of Nursing (UK), History of Nursing Forum Annual Lecture. The work of Best and Bundy on Aboriginal nurses is critical to the expansion of our understanding of the broad nature of nurses and nursing. Their research is also a methodological vision. By focusing on the life and work of Aboriginal nurse Muriel Stanley, Best and Bundy bring into sharp focus the racialized world of nursing in Australia. The article is also crucial to our appreciation of nursing as an important mechanism for social, political, and geographic mobility. The second article by Dr. Ross Hebb takes the story of two famous World War I nurses, Mary Borden and Ellen La Motte, and considers them against two less well-known Canadian nurses, Agnes Warner and Mabel Clint. Hebb takes the “disillusionment canon,” for which Borden and La Motte are renown, and juxtaposes it to Warner and Clint’s writings, which are far more nuanced about war and the place of nursing in it. Hebb’s article highlights the value professional nurses saw in their war work and helps to realign our understanding of what war nursing can mean to those who engage in it. The third article in this volume is our student paper by Dr. Katherine Roberts, who was awarded her PhD just before Christmas 2023. Her work on the emotional community of nursing in World War II uses letters and diaries written by nurses at the time to make sense of their work both within and outside the hospital. Roberts’s analysis considers the expectations imposed on nurses to be stoic and to absorb the needs of their patients, whilst simultaneously ignoring their own needs. In war, those expectations tipped into their social lives and demanded the nurses remain professional and stoic even as they were companions and dance partners to the male officers on active service. The nurse was no longer simply a nurse—she was a female wartime citizen and nurse.The final article is a republication of Professor Sioban Nelson’s seminal historiographical article from 2002, “The Fork in the Road: Nursing History Versus the History of Nursing?” In this work, Nelson explores the position of nursing history as rigorous scholarship, undertaken by researchers who are social historians, women’s historians, historians of race, gender, and ethnicity, as well as nurses themselves. She argues that the broadening of outlook can bring great value to nursing history. To compliment the article for the mid-2020s, Nelson has written a contemporary commentary on her original article and its place in the current historiography. I hope that those of you who read the original article—perhaps several years ago, as I certainly did—will appreciate reading it again with the new commentary. To those who have not previously read “The Fork in the Road,” simply enjoy.In keeping with Nelson’s acknowledgment of the broadening of researchers who are working on nursing history, two of the articles in this volume come from historians who are not nurses. Whilst those of us who are nurses bring a particular focus to our histories, those who are not offer an outsider’s view, which demands us nurses to view our practice in a different way. I hope that whatever your background, you will gain much from the articles published in this volume.

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