'Wanted: 16 nurses of the better educated type': provision of nurses to South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

This paper is based on research in progress focusing on the histories of mission hospitals in the rural communities of KwaZulu Natal, while also building on earlier research into the pluralism of medical systems within the South African Cape. Sources have been drawn from a range of historical documents, including medical and nursing journals, the archives of a number of medical missionary societies and of the Overseas Nursing Association, but the research has also been informed by oral histories of a broad cross‐section of health professionals who practised in South Africa. A large literature search included a number of biographies and institutional histories. The paper will be divided into three parts — the first provides a brief background to colonialism and the early nursing history of South Africa; the second looks in more detail at the role played by missionary nurses in establishing nursing as a profession and providing training opportunities for African nurses. The final part contrasts missionary nursing with the supply of, and work done by nurses from the Overseas Nursing Association operating within their quite specific, colonial remit. This will show how the two contrasting professional spheres — one reflecting a fairly short‐term commitment, the other, a much broader, ‘vocational’ involvement — may be seen to represent quite different colonial attitudes, and ultimately quite diverse outcomes.