Today, May 12, we celebrate International Nurses Day. The contribution of nurses in the field of health takes on special relevance, not only because of the complex health circumstances we are experiencing, but also because the World Health Organization has declared 2020 as the International Year of Nursing. In order to highlight the admirable work of nurses and the need for their leadership, it is not necessary to appeal to the epic of the pandemic. Their greatness also flourishes in the small present and past great events of everyday life.

The road to the recognition of nursing as a profession with its own independent and well-defined scope of action has not been an easy one to travel. In this sense, a look at the history of the profession can give an account of the complex care, social and political situations that nurses have had to face throughout their history. The fact that the social image of nursing has not been in line with its own reality cannot be understood if it is not in consonance with a conglomerate of factors that have hindered the process, such as, among others, the poor consideration given to care administered in the domestic sphere or the survival of certain hierarchical hospital guidelines, which have favored political motives over purely competency-based ones.

In a mostly female profession, the historical perspective can help to rethink nursing and its circumstances. The nursing discipline has evolved in the context of historical events and social movements that have taken place over the last centuries and that have conditioned, particularly, women's access to public life and their traditional subordination in the order of established positions in the social space. In the hospital professional context, women's access to the training was the circumstance that favored the consolidation of their healthcare tasks. The emergence of certain revulsive factors, such as the contributions of religious nurses, the care work of war nurses as catalysts for change, or even the transfer of the care provided by women in the family environment to the paid professional space of work favored, among other things, recognition in accordance with their true contribution.

In such complex health circumstances as the current ones, appealing to the personal testimonies of its protagonists can contribute to the definitive clarification of a partially unknown profession. Traditionally, the expressive power of writing staff has led some nurses to choose this way to offer the vision of their professional life, always inserted in a world of uncertainty. Florence Nightingale, Louisa May Alcott, Priscilla Scott-Ellis, Edith Cavello and more recently, Christie Watson, bring new perspectives on the value of nursing care and the exercise of nursing leadership.

Given the great complexity of a discipline whose object of study is specifically human, its history, and more particularly, the report staff narrative, are essential tools for the consolidation of a deserved and claimed visibility. We cannot speak of nursing without linking it to its history and to the set of events that have marked its development. It is therefore necessary to contrast past and present in an integrative exercise that offers historical answers to the great challenges facing nursing today.