Abstract

With the recent “practice turn” in the field of history, the main focus is again the daily life and the activities of ordinary people. ² At the center of scholarly interest are people’s daily activities and individual practices, but the historians analyze them in close relation to discourses and structures of which these agents were a part. The starting point for this “practice turn” ³ is Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social practice. ⁴ Bourdieu regards the practices that social agents perform as an implicit knowledge but at the same time assumes that discourses and norms are performatively created through such practices. Utilizing this praxeological point of view, this chapter brings a new perspective to the German history of nursing care in the 19th century and focuses in particular on the nurses’actions and spheres of influence while also investigating the relationship between the practices, discourses and structures in this context. It concentrates on Protestant nursing care which, due to its type of training and community style of living and working, became very influential for German nursing care in the 19th century.