Mental Health Nursing ─ The Working Lives of Paid Carers in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

This book seeks to integrate the history of mental health nursing with the wider history of institutional and community care. It develops new research questions by drawing together a concern with exploring the class, gender, skills and working conditions of practitioners with an assessment of the care regimes staff helped create and patients' experiences of them. Such an approach aims to correct the neglect of mental health workers in recent histories of nursing and care.

Contributors from a range of disciplines use a variety of source material to examine both continuity and change in the history of care over two centuries. The rise of the professional nurse is an important part of the narrative, but the detailed studies in this volume reveal that the working lives of paid carers were always shaped by wider social, economic and political forces. Most of the chapters concentrate on Britain and Ireland but an Australian contribution provides useful insight into how these models of care were exported and understood in a colonial context.

The case studies engage with classic history of nursing texts but also develop new perspectives that are brought together in a comprehensive introduction. The book benefits from a foreword by Mick Carpenter who thoughtfully locates the work within traditional and new literature debates. It will appeal to researchers and students interested in all aspects of the history of nursing and the history of care. The book is also designed to be accessible to practitioners and the general reader.

Anne Borsay is Professor of Healthcare and Medical Humanities in the College of Human and Health Sciences at Swansea University

Pamela Dale is an Honorary University Fellow at the University of Exeter