Doing history

History Doing History HE RECENT American Nurses Associat, ion convention commemorating that organizations centennial rekindled many nurses' interest in the still arable field of nursing history. "Doing history" is the expression used to describe the act of doing research in nursing history, and it immediately bonds those who do it into a common culture, as in "Oh, do you do history, too?" You may have seen Donna Diets' and Florence Downs' (1994) commentary in Nursing Research entitled "Colonization: A Measurement of the Development of a Profession," a tongue-in-cheek addition to our ongoing tedious discussion of what characterizes a profession. The authors actually counted the number of colons in the rifles of artides in five leading nursing journals ("titular colonicity") and concluded that "clearly, nursing's scholarly complexity is on the fast track" (p. x). If Diers and Downs had included nursing history publications, they would have been even more favorably impressed because titular colonicity is characteristic of nursing research studies. First comes a catchy phrase, then a colon, then a few words explaining what the study is really about. For example, "Grace Under Pressure: The Nursing Sisters of the Holy Cross, 1861- l 865" (Wall, 1993). Clever? Why do nursing history at all? Most of us would have to admit simply that we love it. But if we must be more academic than that, we state the reasons for studying history in general: to be educated people, to honor our foremothers, to learn from the past and try to make different mistakes. And to me, one of the most cogent reasons is that we are human, and human beings, as far as we know, are the only species with a concept of past, present, and future; ours is the only species with an historical consciousness. When we suffer the loss of our memories, we lose our past and a part of ourselves. Lavinia Dock and Isabel Stewart (1938) wrote, "No occupation can be quite intelligently followed or correctly understood unless it is, at least to some extent, illumed by the light of history interpreted from the human standpoint" (p. 3). Not everyone agrees. Many people believe that nothing worthwhile happened until they arrived on the scene, that the past is best left entirely behind and we need only to look toward the future. This view seems to prevail in nursing curricula because today very little is taught about our professional history. And when it is mentioned, it is often in a deprecatory fashion to point our how far we have come or to show strange artifacts of the past rather than to

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ALMA S. WOOLLEY, EDD, R N

f)rofessarEmeritus Georgetown Universi{y Washington, DC20007 Copyright © 1997 by \V..B. Saunders Company 8755-7223/97/1301-0004503.00/0

inculcate appreciation for the work and struggles of those to whom we owe the evolution of the nursing profession. At the other extreme from the devaluing of history, of course, are the tragedies that fill the daily papers of countries so mired in avenging wrongs of past centuries and even millennia that they are destroying both their present and their future. That is history gone mad. Most faculty members who do history also maintain a clinical specialty to have a job so that they can do historical research. Some faculty members even teach an elective course in nursing history voluntarily and unpaid. They always manage to incorporate history into whatever they teach and to combine it with their clinical area. For example, Dr Barbara Brodie at the University of Virginia teaches in the graduate program in pediatrics and has written extensively in that fidd. Her nursing history research has focused on the care of children, particularly in public health, and she has written about such topics as the role that nurses played in reducing infant mortality in urban areas by teaching mothers how to feed their children dean milk. However, there are other sources of support for historical studies, primarily groups interested in having the work done. The United States Air Force is currently funding a history of Air Force nursing by two faculty members at different universities. The United States Army has been especially supportive of nursing history; an official nurse historian has an office and resources. One Nurse Corps officer recently had a full-time assignment to write the history of the Army Nurse Corps. The International Council of Nurses is funding a history of its organization that is being carried out by faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania. Alumni groups frequently fund the writing of their school's history for a special occasion. Some of the same debates that occupy other historians are also going on in nursing history. Should histories have a theoretical framework, or should we just report the data as accurately as possible? Nursing certainly lends itself to such themes as feminism, power, and sexism. Should we deconstruct history to fit our current ways of thinking? Or should we look as closely as we can at what seems to have happened without reinterpreting or transposing it to the present? Perhaps we even need to reconstruct what has been deconstructed. References

Diets, D., & Downs, E (1994). Colonization: A measurement of the development of a profession. Nursing Research, 43(5), 316-318. Dock, L., & Stewart, I. (1938). A short history ofTmrsing (4th ed.). New York: Putnam. Knille, R. (1985). As I was say#~g.A Chesrerton reader. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Wall, B. M. (1993). Grace under pressure: The Nursing Sisters of the Holy Cross, 1861-1865. Nursing History Review, i, 71-87.

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