In 1984, Janet Wilson James turned a fairly prosaic request to review a series of recently published books on the history of nursing into an intriguing and influential essay about the current state of scholarship on the subject. That essay, "Writing and Rewriting Nursing History," published in this journal, argued that nursing's traditionally descriptive narratives of its past could no longer exist in historiographic isolation from relevant themes in social and women's history. James was not the first to advance this argument: Celia Davies and Ellen Lagemann had previously done so in introductions to works in their respective collections of essays. Davies, concentrating on scholarship by British historians in the late 1970s, and Lagemann, considering American papers presented at the Rockefeller Archive Center's conference on the history of nursing in 1981, paid more attention than did James, in fact, to attempts to ground revisionist nursing history in the "new" social history and its emphasis on the mighty triumvirate of race, class, and gender.
Nevertheless, James had been a colleague and a friend to authors of both the more cautious and uncritical narrations of nursing's historical progress and those attempting newer, more conceptually driven approaches. Hence, her analysis explicitly reached out to both. She respected the works of those who focused on nursing's achievements; these studies were, she explained, "the first investigations of important topics, the product of devoted effort." Yet their wish to "filter out the intractable problems" inherent in their topic had so narrowed their perspective that they had lost the stirring interpretive sweep that their early-twentieth-century nursing predecessors had brought to their own historical narratives. Some other works, however, excited her: Barbara Melosh's emphasis on nursing's workplace culture; Christopher Maggs's attention to issues of demography, social class, and gender stereotyping; and Wanda Heistand's explorations of the implications of family history for nursing's history were "signs," she suggested, "of life and thought reviving." The resuscitation, however, had yet to be declared successful. "Nursing history," James concluded, still looked "something like the elephant as described by the blind men." Some pieces of its past had received intriguing reconsiderations; others were completely ignored. Still, she found promise for the future, particularly in the opening of the "two-way street" between the historical traditions of nursing and those of the liberal arts.
Now, a decade later, it is worth pausing to consider what effect the cross-disciplinary reciprocity that James championed has had on the writing of nursing's history. At first glance, that effect seems profound. Understanding the work of nurses has reshaped historians' sense of the historical hospital, the treatment of disease, the birth of babies, and the role of women in their families and their communities. And there are now few stories told about nurses by nurses without some reference, however fleeting, to the issues of gender, class, race, and the politics of professionalism. There is, to be sure, considerable debate in the field about the ultimate implications of such analyses for nursing's history. Has nursing, for example, been defined by gender, or has its work transcended sex-based stereotypes? Have class and race differences only bred divisiveness, or has the heterogeneity of the nursing work force helped the discipline forge an identity akin to that of those it served? Has the professionalizing agenda devalued nursing's craft traditions, or has it been a vehicle of upward economic mobility and respected social status? The historians dealing with such questions no longer fall into neatly defined categories: those who trained first as clinicians are often as willing to explore the implications of class analysis as are those who trained exclusively in the liberal arts to entertain notions of professionalizing power.
The problem, however, is that the "two-way street" James envisioned has seen much of its meaningful intellectual traffic slow to a crawl. The publication of Barbara Melosh's The Physician's Hand in 1982, Susan Reverby's Ordered to Care in 1987, and Darlene Clark Hine's Black Women in White in 1989 essentially established these debates, and the succeeding years have seen little in...