Vol. 2 (2020): Bads in Nursing Ethics, History and Historiography

The question of what constitutes good care and how the understanding of this varies historically and culturally is the subject of intensive reflections on the history and ethics of care. Less attention, however, is paid to negative experiences in nursing care. According to the Dutch philosopher Annemarie Mol such experiences are termed ambiguously as “bads” in care: “There is something else that bothers me. It is that somehow writing about the goods of care is just too nice. Too cosy. There are also bads to address, but how to do so?” (Mol 2010)

The second issue of the European Journal for Nursing History and Ethics is related to the International Conference “’Bads’ in healthcare: Negative experience as an impetus to reform in nineteenth and twentieth centuries” organised by the Swiss Society of the History of Health and Nursing, 21/22 June 2018 in Winterthur, Switzerland. The aim of the conference was to enlarge our understanding of how nurses were interlinked with “bads” in healthcare, of how they addressed and responded to negative experiences and how they contributed to the reform of healthcare in the 19th and 20th centuries.

--- Photo: Nurse of the Pitkäniemi Mental Asylum, 1905-1915, Collection: “Photos of Pitkäniemi Mental Asylum” (1171:22), Museum Centre Vapriikki, Tampere, Finland