Toward a History of Health Care: Repositioning the Histories of Nursing and Medicine

This positioning paper presents a new paradigm for the history of both nursing and medicine that will involve studying these actors and their practices in relation to each other rather than, as we have done, in isolation. This is not to say that both disciplines have had the same orientation and the same ambitions. Nursing, as I argue, has had a more constant focus and impact on its particular communities; medicine, by contrast, more successfully articulated a commitment to depersonalized knowledge and expertise that seemed to transcend individual and community experiences. Yet these may be the two sides of the same proverbial coin. Nursing and medicine needed each other to make their particular claims to authority and expertise and, in the end, to achieve the success of their "scientific agenda. "