New publication From the UK Association for the History of Nursing

Bulletin Volume 9 2021  

To coincide with Black History Month, the UK Association for the History of Nursing is excited to announce the publication of its 2021 issue of the UKAHN Bulletin, which focuses entirely on the history of race in nursing.  

We believe this is the first such collection to be published and more than anything we want it to encourage others to continue to reveal this history. We have been particularly fortunate to have Karen Flynn, a leading historian in the US in Gender, Women’s and African-American Studies as Guest Editor. Her Editorial highlights the good work which has been done, but also raises penetrating questions about the gaps and oversights in the existing historiography. 

The idea arose out of events which followed the killing of George Floyd in 2020:  popular uprisings against racial discrimination, manifested globally through the actions of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the UK the events of 2020 renewed public interest in the appropriateness of some public statues, culminating in the upturning of the statue of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol. Black British historians, such as David Olusoga, have used the events of 2020 to highlight the lack of attention to Black history in British history. In turn, we want this issue of the Bulletin to stimulate academic engagement with the history of racism and nursing in Britain. We want to encourage more historians, and following the lead of one group of contributors to this Issue, The Young Historians Project, more young historians in particular, to take up the challenge - we need more work on the history of Black, Asian and other minority-group nurses and nursing in the UK. 

But this Issue does not focus just on Britain: the 2021 Bulletin brings together a collection of new and reproduced work from authors as far afield as India, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Australia, USA and the Caribbean, each writing about history of nursing in their own regions from their own perspectives.  

We hope you get as much enjoyment, challenge, and stimulation from reading these papers as we have from working with the authors and producing this year’s Bulletin.  

With thanks and best wishes,

Jane Brooks