GLOBAL NETWORKING
Reporting from Germany is STEPHANIE KIRBY, Research Fellow at the Centre for Learning and Workforce Research, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, University of the West of England in Bristol.
Second International Conference on Nursing History
Stuttgart • 12-14 March 2008
Organised by the Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation in Stuttgart, the theme this time was the history of everyday nursing. The organisers, along with many nursing historians, were of the opinion that the history of nursing care has been neglected in favour of the history of professionalisation, so the conference provided a timely opportunity to focus on this significant topic.
The area was thoroughly explored over three days as delegates from Germany, Austria, Norway, the UK and USA came together to hear 20 papers and take part in the discussions each paper generated.
This conference was not about the "great names" of nursing: it was a celebration of "ordinary" nurses doing core nursing work in different settings and under diverse circumstances - hospital and community nursing, the nursing work of religious orders, and nursing patients with infectious diseases or mental illness.
Other papers covered nurses in the overseas missions and those migrating from Asia to work in post WWII Germany.
No language barriers
English speakers were relieved that English was the language of the conference and suitably humbled by the erudition of our German, Austrian and Norwegian co-delegates, expressed in our mother tongue.
Delegates, like some of the patients we discussed, were cared for in a holistic manner by our hosts at the Institute for the History of Medicine. The smooth running of the conference owed much to the organisational skills of Steffi Adam and Sylvelyn Hähner-Rombach, who mentioned a future conference in her concluding remarks. This is eagerly anticipated.