Mental health nursing

The working lives of paid carers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Edited by Anne Borsay, Pamela Dale

Publication date:

01 July 2015

Length of book:

288 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

216x138mm

ISBN-13: 9780719096938

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. 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 book benefits from a foreword by Mick Carpenter and 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.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, Good health and well-being.

Introduction – Anne Borsay and Pamela Dale
1. Psychiatric nurses and their patients in the nineteenth century: The Irish perspective – Oonagh Walsh
2. A duty to learn: Attendant training in Victoria, Australia 1880–1907 – Lee-Ann Monk
3.‘Who are these?’ Nursing shell–shocked patients in Cardiff during the First World War – Anne Borsay and Sara Knight
4. Discourses of dispute: Narratives of asylum nurses and attendants, 1910–1922 – Barbara Douglas
5. ‘Surely a nice occupation for a girl?’ Stories of nursing, gender, violence and mental illness in British asylums, 1914–30 – Vicky Long
6. Re–assessing staffing requirements and creating new roles for nurses during a period of rapid institutional change at the RWCI, 1927–48 – Pamela Dale
7. ‘The weakest link in the chain of nursing’? Recruitment and retention in mental health nursing in England, 1948–68 – Claire Chatterton
8. Wardens, letter writing, and the welfare state, 1944–74 – John Welshman
9. Learning disability nursing: Surviving change c. 1970–90 – Duncan Mitchell
10. Between asylum and community: The DGH psychiatric nurse, Withington Hospital, 1971–91 –Val Harrington
Index

‘This book is an enjoyable read and of interest to professional and history scholars as well as health professionals, students and others interested in critical perspectives on mental health work.’
Geertje Boschma, University of British Columbia

‘It is encouraging to see works like this begin to fill out the scanty literature on mental health nursing history, and hopefully this will inform future research in this undervalued area.’
Philippa Martyr, University of Western Australia, Health and History 18/2

‘This is an important book, and a timely reminder that, in spite of setting or of policy, those who work on the front line of patient care are the ones who often have the biggest impact on patient experience. Within the caring relationship, the patient and the nursing staff are inextricably bound, and this volume allows us to further understand the intricacies involved in this important, complex relationship.’
H-Net Reviews, April 2018