Nursing history has become a robust and reflective area of scholarship, which recognises the inescapable social, political, economic and cultural factors influencing the profession. Nursing History and the Politics of Welfare highlights the significant contribution that researching nursing history has to make in settling a new intellectual and political agenda for nurses. Reflecting the international scale of current research, seventeen contributors look at nursing from different perspectives, as it has developed under different regimes and ideologies and at different points in time in America, Australia, Britain, Germany, India, the Phillipines and South Africa. They examine the ways in which the nursing workforce is segmented and stratified along race, class and gender lines and how differences of culture undermine attempts to theorise nursing and health care in universal terms. Comparing the problems and potential of the "equal" rights and "different" approaches, they propose strategies for achieving greater recognition for nursing, to bring it into line with other related, yet male-dominated professions within the health care arena.