A rich debate concerning the nature of historical inquiry has ensued for much of the latter half of the twentieth century. According to Jenkins, this ‘history debate’ is concerned with whether historical knowledge can ever be obtained through objective inquiry or whether it is an interpretive, intersubjective process (Jenkins 1991). This debate is best exemplified in the views of seminal writers in the philosophy of history, such as Elton and Carr.

For Elton, the historian and philosopher of history, historical method consists of a critical examination of the available evidence, and, ideally, only that evidence, to reconstruct the events of history and their causes (Roberts 1998). What distinguishes history from other forms of inquiry is the role of evidence in generating, delimiting, and validating the assertions and conclusions of historians, and any interpretations of the past on the part of the historian should be permitted to emerge only from the evidence to hand. History is the rigorous pursuit of facts that are to be presented without the interpretive intrusion of the historian; governed by the evidence of the past, historical inquiry should, therefore, be balanced and objective (Elton 1967). Elton’s position is not to deny the role of the historian in the process of historical inquiry, but to caution against writing a narrative that is based on limited evidence, conjecture, and subjective bias. In this ‘common sense’, empiricist view of history, the facts are seen as a priori, separate and independent of the historian, and the interpretations and conclusions are the historian’s way of presenting the facts (Carr 1987).

In his seminal book What is History?, Carr challenges this empiricist view of history, arguing that the historian plays a central role in the process and the product of historical inquiry:

On the role of the historian in dealing with historical ‘facts’, Carr remarks:

For Carr (1987), history is the product of the historian’s interpretation of available facts; historical inquiry is imbued with the particular view of the historian, is conducted for a purpose, and is as much a representation of the historian’s perspective as it is about true facts.

These perspectives reflect a type of art–science distinction that are rendered passé in a postmodern perspective, which calls into question the possibility that objective historical truth can ever exist (Rafferty 1997). Thus, from a postmodern perspective, when subjected to interpretation, the historical evidence may have multiple meanings (Brooks 2000). Moreover, as a form of thought, postmodernism rejects any kind of narrative, such as the Marxist critique of capitalism, and is antipathetic to sociological abstractions such as class, capitalism, and even society itself (Foster 1997). It rejects notions of historical determinism, denies that history is purposive and ‘that it is possible to have a definitive knowledge of the origins, causes, tendencies, and fundamental constitutive elements of history’ (Foster 1997, p. 185). This scepticism is extended to a rejection of the certainties of modernism, as exemplified in the scientific method of cause and effect. Within the discipline of history, postmodernism does not confine itself to disciplinary boundaries and may readily cross the boundaries of many disciplines in the pursuit of historical scholarship.

Interest in history extends to all cultures, and any differences in cultural approaches to history generally occur in different historiographical traditions (Burke 2002). Burke (2002) identifies a number of propositions or ‘theses’, which characterise Western historical thought and which represent the sort of ideas, assumptions or emphases within the tradition. These ‘peculiarities of the West’ include:

It is possible to extract some of the trends in Western historical thinking in the ways that nursing history has been conducted. For example, the first major histories of nursing written in the early years of the twentieth century characterised nursing history as a history of development and progress (Rafferty 1992). With its interest in social groups, such as social classes, the professions, religious orders and women as a distinct social group, nursing history also emphasises ‘collective agency’. Nevertheless, nursing history also places great emphasis on the role that individuals played in historical events inside and outside of nursing and is a particular characteristic of nursing history.

Echoing Burke’s exposition of the assumptions of Western historiography, Lynaugh and Reverby (1987) refer to the ‘myths of history’, or the common assumptions concerning the nature of nursing history that can give rise to problems with the quality and credibility of historical research. Among these assumptions are that historical research is about seeking a single truth or cause, that history must be about important events and important people, and that good history will arise from good facts. In cautioning against adherence to such assumptions, Lynaugh and Reverby (1987) argue that there may be multiple forms of explanation for historical evidence, some of which ‘fit’ better than others, and they remark:

According to Connolly (2004), the two methodological paradigmatic traditions in the discipline of history in the twentieth century were ‘political history’ and ‘social history’. The former presented history through the lens of politics and the state, important events, and ‘great’ people, and it represented a consensus, deterministic and somewhat celebratory approach. The latter, in contrast, emphasised the lives of ordinary people and it approached history in a more critical way using interpretive frames of reference that included gender, class, race and ethnicity. Connolly points out that, while social history was the dominant paradigm after the 1960s, the boundaries between political and social history became blurred in the 1990s, with each paradigm drawing on the contribution of the other, resulting in the emergence of a new synthesis of social and political history. Connolly contends that the broader history debates and the shifting methodological trends in the discipline are of concern to nurse historians and that the newly synthesised paradigm of political history can provide nurse historians with new subject matter and new interpretive frames of reference when studying nursing history.

While historical inquiry relies on reliable evidence, the historian must acknowledge that, as with all research, the evidence is finite, that interpretations and conclusions can be gleaned from ‘samples’ of the evidence and that the particular can be at least partially representative of the general. The evidence for historical research is located in diverse sites and is often interspersed with other archives and repositories, such as medical and institutional archives (Fealy 2005 and Ó hÓgartaigh 1999).