The Future of Health Care’s Past

Abstract

On April 14, 2012, the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing held a symposium on the Future of Healthcare's Past both as a festschrift to honor Joan E. Lynaugh and as a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Bates Center that she, with Ellen Baer and Karen Buhler-Wilkerson, created in 1985. I am delighted to have the opportunity to publish some papers from this festschrift and birthday celebration in this volume of the Nursing History Revieiv. These papers speak to the very personal effects Joan has had on so many careers; and to the very profound effect she has had on transforming what Sioban Nelson has called the professional agenda of nursing history-internalist narratives that spoke to the concerns of the discipline-to one that used the history of nursing as a lens to see how the experiences of nurses answered broader questions about women's (and some men) roles, opportunities, labor, and place in health care practices.1But this festschrift and symposium allowed me to think more deeply about Joan's role as the founding editor of the Nursing History Revieiv. Joan, in consultation with colleagues such as Vernon Bullough and Barbara Brodie, brought together an interdisciplinary editorial board that consisted of such scholars as Nettie Birnbach, Olga Church, Donna Diers, Marilyn Flood, Diane Hamilton, Darlene Clark Hine, Beatrice Kalish, Susan Reverby, and Nancy Tomes. Together the Board and Joan made the critical decisions that immediately set the standards that made the Review the preeminent journal in our field.These standards still guide the Review some 21 years later. First, the Review patterns itself after other historical journals: rather than clinical journals that expect authors to make their case in less than 16 pages, the Review allows authors some 30 or so manuscript pages to make nuanced arguments about topics that uses nurses and nursing to engage with important historiographical debates. Second, Joan remained committed to an absolute insistence on the highest quality of scholarship-even if that meant publishing few articles in each volume. She insisted on an interdisciplinarity and global focus long before these were popular. Joan also created the template for an active editorship: she never waited for papers to come to her but rather actively sought out those within and outside our discipline mining the insights that the history of nursing might create. And she gave so generously of her time to young scholars and to those working without the support of formal centers. The result: the Revieiv, published annually, has a small and specialized audience of historians and nurses, but its global prestige and impact as the leading journal in its field belie its size. In 2003, the Review was selected as one of the first of only 27 nursing journals chosen to calculate impact factors by the ISI Web of Knowledge; and in 2004, our quantitative colleagues recognized its place as an influential journal with a strong international presence.2I have certainly stood on the shoulders of a giant-a giant who not only mentored me in this role when I first assumed editorship in 2002 but who also knew when to step back and let me chart a new direction for the Review as it made its way into the 21st century. And looking out on these shoulders, I am very excited about the future of health care's past. The field of the his- tory of nursing, to paraphrase Ellen Lageman is once again in ferment and its scholars, to paraphrase Celia Davis, see themselves working on the cutting edge of history, policy, and practice. Recently, a new generation of scholars with different backgrounds and experiences are turning to the history of nurs- ing with new paradigms and methodological tools. …