European Nursing Traditions and Global Experiences. An Entangled History

Abstract

The article draws on the currently intense debate on a transnationally conceived history and discusses the specificity of a European history of nursing. Using deaconess motherhouses as an example the article reveals that nursing organisations, nursing concepts and practices in Europe developed mutually in transnational exchanges. To analyse these, comparative approaches and also approaches from transfer and entangled history are required. An entangled history of nursing can address the mutual exchange processes and illustrate how similarities developed in the various countries, despite the differences. European nursing traditions can thus also be made visible as shared traditions which evolved in exchange with non-European countries. With regard to ethical questions we can show on the one hand the establishment of common value systems and explain on the other hand that these must be interpreted differently depending on the region, time and context. The article illustrates furthermore, that a European nursing history can question well-kept hegemonic discourses on the history of nursing – informed by US-American norms of secular-professional standards. A decidedly European perspective will therefore make the history of nursing more complex and contradictory but also significantly more interesting in many respects.