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Nurses and management are partners in hospital service delivery. Currently, there are gaps in understanding what fosters this partnership and how it has changed over time. This research investigated the topics that punctuated the nurse-manager relationship from 50 years ago, from the viewpoint of Canadian hospital management. A content review was conducted on the 1962 issues of the "national professional publication for hospital management." Five dominant themes are reported and discussed.

In "Looking Back 50 Years in Hospital Administration," Graham and Sibbald identify five principal themes in the 1962 issues of Hospital Administration in Canada: the evolution of nursing, funding and legislation, hospital design, patient care and infection control and leadership. These themes are of course consistent with thematic concerns regarding healthcare in 2012; in some ways, this consistency over 50 years is disappointing, but not surprising. This commentary examines some of the specific themes.

Healthcare policy and hospital administration are dynamic and growing fields, oriented toward shaping the future. In an effort to understand where these fields have come from, as well as some of the re-occuring challenges faced, we conducted a retrospective analysis. Our research identified progress and major accomplishments, as well as issues that continue to challenge the field in five key areas: (1) the evolution of nursing, (2) funding and legislation, (3) hospital design, construction and technology, (4) patient care and infection control and (5) leadership. To explore these areas, a thematic content review was conducted on the 12 inaugural issues of Hospital Administration in Canada, a hospital administration periodical from 1962. All written content was reviewed, coded and categorized into major themes that represented the major hospital administration topics of 50 years ago. In this article, five prominent themes are explored and further illustrated using key stories and milestones from 1962.

The shift of missionary nursing from the center to the margins of nursing practice can be traced to the unceremonious closure of China as a mission field in the late 1940s. Building on a larger study of Canadian missionary nursing at the United Church of Canada North China Mission between 1888 and 1947, this paper traces Clara Preston's experiences during the last tumultuous days of the mission during the height of China's civil war. Drawing on rich data from the United Church of Canada/ Victoria University Archives, private family collections (photos, letters, memoirs) as well as from three on-site visits to the Weihui Hospital in Henan, China, this paper focuses on the questions 'what happened during the last days of Canadian missionary nursing in China?' and 'why is so little known about missionary nursing?' According to this study, three issues contributed to the silencing of missionary nursing after 1947: the self-censorship of repatriated missionaries, the mission identity crises catalyzed by the 'failure' of the missionary enterprise in China, and the equating of the missionary movement with colonialism and imperialism in academic discourse.

The Church canonized one of our own: the "Mother of Universal Charity," as Pope John XXIII so aptly called her in 1959, a sister of action and contemplation who opened her heart to the urgent needs of her time, a Canadian wife and mother who innovated hospital and health care, a person for whom love knew no boundaries.

In this article, the development of nursing in Canada is described in terms of three major time periods: the emergence of lay nursing, including organization and registration, 1870-1930; the move to the hospital, 1930-1950; and unionization and the routinization of health care, 1950 to the present. This development is viewed in the light of the orienting concepts of professionalization, proletarianization, and medical dominance (and gender analysis). This historical trajectory of nursing shows an increasing occupational autonomy but continuing struggles over control of the labor process. Nursing is now using theory, organizational changes in health care, and credentialism to help make nursing "separate from but equal to" medicine and to gain control over the day-to-day work of the nurse. Nursing can thus be viewed as undergoing processes of both professionalization and proletarianization. As nursing seeks to control the labor process, its occupational conflicts are joined to the class struggle of white-collar workers in general. Analysis of nursing indicates the problems involved in sorting out the meaning of concepts that are relevant to occupational or class analysis but which focus on the same empirical phenomenon.