Includes bibliographical references and index.

Foreword. The struggle is never over / Mick Carpenter -- Mental health nursing : the working lives of paid carers from 1800 to the 1990s / Anne Borsay and Pamela Dale -- Psychiatric nurses and their patients in the nineteenth century : the Irish perspective / Oonagh Walsh -- A duty to learn : attendant training in Victoria, Australia, 1880-1907 / Lee-Ann Monk -- 'Who are these?' : nursing shell-shocked patients in Cardiff during the First World War / Anne Borsay and Sara Knight -- Discourse of dispute : narratives of asylum nurses and attendants, 1910-22 / Barbara Douglas -- 'Surely a nice occupation for a girl?' : stories of nursing, gender, violence and mental illness in British asylums, 1914-30 / Vicky Long -- Reassessing staffing requirements and creating new roles for nurses during a period of rapid change at the Royal Western Counties Institution, 1927-48 / Pamela Dale -- 'The weakest link in the chain of nursing?' : recruitment and retention in mental health nursing in England, 1948-68 / Claire Chatterton -- Wardens, letter writing and the welfare state, 1944-74 / John Welshman -- Learning disability nursing : surviving change, c. 1970-90 / Duncan Mitchell -- Between asylum and community : DGH psychiatric nurses at Withington General Hospital, 1971-91 / Val Harrington.

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 research.

In English.