E3 Roundtable: Resuscitating the History of Nursing: A Roundtable on New Methods, Clinical Audiences, and Institutional Challenges Dominique Tobbell, University of Virginia (chair) Ren Capucao, University of Virginia
Marissa L. Nichols, Emory University
Andre Rosario, Rutgers University
In her 2022 Bulletin of the History of Medicine positioning paper, nurse and historian Patricia D’Antonio related nursing history to the history of medicine and called for new directions in the history of nursing. Theoretically and conceptually, nursing history has heeded critical cues from postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, queer theory, and disability studies. Historians have also engaged audiences of nurses and health policymakers through the digital humanities and collaborative interdisciplinary articles in health-science journals. Thus, this roundtable explores the following questions: How have nurses–as historical actors, care laborers, and as people–navigated their social and political contexts? What are new methodological approaches for studying the history of nursing? Also, what are the practical, material, and institutional circumstances that have forced historians–especially those working in nursing and health-sciences schools–to undertake these new approaches?
This roundtable brings together a diverse group of scholars who study nursing history in various contexts around the globe. Ravenne Aponte's project, "Nurses You Should Know," utilizes an Equity-Centered Community Design Framework to showcase the contributions of past and present nurses of color, serving as a resource for clinicians and educators. Ren Capucao explores the transnational history of Filipino nurses between the Philippines and the United States through a critical disability lens. Marissa Nichols’s work utilizes a linguistic analysis to center Indigenous nurses in twentieth-century histories of healthcare and development in Mexico. Andre Rosario “speaks two languages” when addressing historians and nursing or health researchers about his work, which focuses on immigrant nurses in the United States and examines their roles in shaping policies that protect other foreign-trained nurses from predatory international recruitment companies. The roundtable will be chaired by Dominique Tobbell, Centennial Distinguished Professor of Nursing and Director of the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry at the University of Virginia.
