In 1986, the Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at Penn Nursing received official recognition as a center by the University of Pennsylvania. Its inaugural leadership included visionary nursing leaders like Joan S. Lynaugh, Ellen D. Baer, and Lillian S. Brunner, and the historian of medicine Charles Rosenberg. From its earliest days, the Center articulated a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary mission that aimed to document, collect, and preserve the history of nursing and to produce new research in the history of nursing for the benefit of the nursing profession. But perhaps more than anything else, the Center has served as a crucial community-building hub that has historically brought together scholars and students from a wide variety of backgrounds. Nurses, historians, and physicians (and all the combinations therein) have found themselves drawn into the Bates Center’s orbit over the years. Through its expansive archival collections as well as its outreach in education, research, publication, funding, and programming, the Center has arguably had an outsized impact on shaping the field of the history of nursing given its small size. Its reach has spread around the world, its impact profoundly shaping not only the history of nursing, but also the history of medicine and the field of nursing itself. This roundtable brings together six individuals who have helped shape the Bates Center’s story over the past four decades to critically discuss the Center’s dual role as a bridge between nursing and history, and between the history of nursing and the history of medicine. Please join us as we recognize the Bates Center’s 40th anniversary with a critical and lively discussion of the Center’s past impact, its struggles, its successes, and how we can build on this rich and complicated past to envision its future.
Learning Outcomes- Develop the capacity for critical thinking about the nature, ends and limits of nursing and medicine.
- Identify successes and failures in the history of nursing and medical professionalism.
- Recognize the dynamic interrelationship between nursing, medicine and society through history
