The Nursing Apprentice: An Historical Perspective

Abstract

History records the process of change and can become a guide for the future if it is used to analyze past events. Social history, though often difficult to define, is most commonly associated with the history of social activities, as, for example, the membership in and development of a profession such as nursing. In nursing research, the historical approach has generally been neglected, with the result that the whole area of the social history of the nursing profession has also been neglected. In Canada, the scarcity of literature reflects the absence of researchers who have expertise and interest in this area. There are, however, elusive questions to raise: data must be pulled together to retrieve older nurse's work lives from invisibility; studies, which will enrich our knowledge of nursing's past through first hand accounts of these activities, can be undertaken by the oral history approach. In order to broaden our understanding of the world of nursing, we need to broaden the area of research by interviewing older Canadian nurses who have important stories to tell. Far too often valuable information from one generation to another is lost because it has not been recorded.