REVIEW SYMPOSIUM A LADY DISPLACED, AGAIN, AGAIN, AND AGAIN Judith Godden, Lucy Osburn, A Lady Displaced. Sydney, Australia: University of Sydney Press, 2006. Pp. x+373. £23.50 Au$34.95 HB By Julie Fairman It is refreshing to find a historian as prominent as Judith Godden interested in the history of nursing. Despite its sometimes whiggish past of practitioner historians using it to legitimate the profession, nursing history informs women’s, religious, economic, medical, gen- der and race relations, and colonial history, to name just a few of the disciplinary possibilities. There are, to be sure, nurse historians who effectively meld disciplinary knowledge with historical perspec- tive. Joan Lynaugh, Patricia D’Antonio, Barbara Mann Wall, Arlene Keeling, Sioban Nelson, Meryn Stuart, and Anne Marie Rafferty exemplify the field. Even so, many historians in general seem reluctant to study nursing through their particular lens, per- haps because nursing as a highly gendered profession carries with it connotations of dependency on the more socially empowered and typically gendered male medical profession. Judith Godden, along with Susan Reverby, Charles Rosenberg, Darlene Clark Hines, and Judith Leavitt illustrate how useful and powerful nursing may be as a way to understand larger social phenomena from an historical vantage point. This biography of Lucy Osburn, a strong middle class English- woman, a lady sent to Australia by Florence Nightingale to take charge of the nurse training and nursing care at the Sydney Infir- mary in 1868, uses nursing as a powerful vehicle to focus on three particular themes: the challenges Victorian women faced as they entered the public sphere as useful citizens, class and gender con- flicts, and the influence of religious sectarianism (pp. 4–5). All of Metascience (2008) 17:329–349 Ó Springer 2008 DOI 10.1007/s11016-008-9203-4