‘It was like a family’: nurses as change makers in mental hospitals

Calabria, V ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8823-8192 and Oswald, U, 2025. ‘It was like a family’: nurses as change makers in mental hospitals. Family and Community History, 28 (3), pp. 221-245. ISSN 1463-1180

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Abstract

Psychiatric nurses have long been portrayed as peripheral figures in the history of mental healthcare, subordinate to medical authority or as agents of institutional discipline. This article re-evaluates their role, arguing that nursing labour was central to the affective life of the mental hospital. Drawing on oral histories of former nurses, patients and other staff of two defunct hospitals, as well as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archival sources, it examines how psychiatric nursing created community and belonging within institutional settings. Close analysis of these testimonies highlights the affective labour and interpersonal skills involved in sustaining the hospital’s social worlds. Nurses emerge not as passive enforcers of institutional control but as key relational actors who mediated between institutional structure and psychosocial rehabilitation. This article reframes institutional care as a negotiated space in which nurses played a foundational role in cultivating care, social connections and relational continuity relevant to current policy debates.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Family and Community History
Creators:	Calabria, V. and Oswald, U.
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
Date:	December 2025
Volume:	28
Number:	3
ISSN:	1463-1180
Identifiers:	Number Type 2521522 Other
Rights:	© 2025 the author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Laura Borcherds
Date Added:	04 Nov 2025 10:44
Last Modified:	13 Jan 2026 10:48
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/54666

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