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.

Pamela Dale is an Honorary University Fellow at the University of Exeter

Introduction Anne Borsay and Pamela Dale1. Psychiatric nurses and their patients in the nineteenth century: The Irish perspective Oonagh Walsh2. A duty to learn: Attendant training in Victoria, Australia 18801907 Lee-Ann Monk3.Who are these? Nursing shellshocked patients in Cardiff during the First World War Anne Borsay and Sara Knight4. Discourses of dispute: Narratives of asylum nurses and attendants, 19101922 Barbara Douglas 5. Surely a nice occupation for a girl? Stories of nursing, gender, violence and mental illness in British asylums, 191430 Vicky Long6. Reassessing staffing requirements and creating new roles for nurses during a period of rapid institutional change at the RWCI, 192748 Pamela Dale 7. The weakest link in the chain of nursing? Recruitment and retention in mental health nursing in England, 194868 Claire Chatterton8. Wardens, letter writing, and the welfare state, 194474 John Welshman9. Learning disability nursing: Surviving change c. 197090 Duncan Mitchell10. Between asylum and community: The DGH psychiatric nurse, Withington Hospital, 197191 Val Harrington Index