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Background The ‘digital age’ has led to a renaissance in historical methods. The way in which nurse historians can search, collate and analyse sources has changed exponentially over the past two decades. The mass digitisation of books, newspapers and other documents has resulted in the removal of many long-standing barriers to performing historical research, such as budgetary and access restrictions. Despite these expanded opportunities, the nurse historian now faces new challenges when performing historical research. Aim This paper aims to stimulate discussion on the risky business of conducting nursing historical research in the ‘digital age’. In this paper, we examine the technology-born challenges encountered by nurse historians with the objective of proffering potential solutions to address such issues. Discussion Three contemporary challenges faced by nurse historians are: not knowing how to contain and articulate online searching; being unable to reduce the number of optical character recognition inaccuracies with digitised archaic sources; and being unsure of how to safely incorporate technological tools into historical analysis. Conclusion Used correctly, new technologies can augment and strengthen traditional historical methods. Nurse historians need to be mindful that the way in which technologies are used is controlled by the user, rather than the technology itself.

Care left undone, interchangeably referred to as missed care, unfinished nursing care and task incompletion, is pervasive in contemporary healthcare systems. Care left undone can result in adverse outcomes for the patient, nurse and organization. The rhetoric that surrounds care left undone infers it is a contemporary nursing phenomenon; however, a seventeenth‐century Spanish nursing treatise, Instruccion de Enfermeros (Instructions for Nurses), challenges this assumption. Instruccion de Enfermeros was an instructional guide that was written for members of the Congregation of Bernardino de Obregon who worked as nurses at the Madrid General Hospital. The treatise provides a historical commentary on the daily roles, responsibilities and working conditions of the Obregonian nurses. Its content and context suggest the Obregonian nursing resource was consistently time poor due to a confluence of internal and external stressors. Consequently, the Obregonians were under considerable role strain resulting in inferior patient care. This article explores the antecedents of care left undone through a historical lens using exemplars from the 1625 edition of Instruccion de Enfermeros. Factors contributing to care left undone in Obregonian nursing will then be examined to offer insights into the similarities between what a nurse suffered 400 years ago and what exists in contemporary nursing practice.

Since the 1980s, many fields of qualitative research have adopted LINCOLN and GUBA's (1985) four criteria for determining rigour (credibility, confirmability, dependability and transferability) to evaluate the quality of research outputs. Historical research is one field of qualitative inquiry where this is not the case. While most historical researchers recognise the need to be rigorous in their methods in order to improve the trustworthiness of their results, ambiguity exists about how rigour is demonstrated in historical research. As a result, strategies to establish rigour remain focused on piecemeal activities (e.g., source criticism) rather than adopting a whole-of-study approach. Using a piecemeal approach makes it difficult for others to understand the researcher's rationale for the methods used and decisions made during the research process. Fragmenting approaches to rigour may contribute to questioning of the legitimacy of historical methods. In this article, we provide a critique of the challenges to achieving rigour that currently exist in historical research. We then offer practical strategies that can be incorporated into historical methods to address these challenges with the aim of producing a more transparent historical narrative., Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, Vol 20, No 2 (2019): Harold Garfinkel's "Studies in Ethnomethodology". An Interview Issue