Historic Perspectives on Nursing
• Nursing history is not an ornament to be displayed on anniversary days, nor does it consist of only happy stories to be recalled and retold on special occasions.
• Nursing history is a vivid testimony, meant to incite, instruct and inspire today's nurses as they bravely trod the winding path of a reinvented health care system.
• History provides current nurses with the same intellectual and political tools that determined nursing pioneers applied to shape nursing values and beliefs to the social context of their times.