This paper charts the history and debates surrounding the introduction of academic, university-based training of nurses in South Africa. This was a process that was drawn out over five decades, beginning in the late 1930s. For nurses, university training was an important part of a process of professionalization; however, for other members of the medical community, nursing was seen as being linked to women's service work. Using the case-study of the University of the Witwatersrand, one of South Africa's premier universities and the place in the country to offer a university-based nursing program, we argue that an historical understanding of the ways in which nursing education was integrated into the university system tells us a great deal about the professionalization of nursing. This paper also recognises, for the first time, the pioneers of this important process. It is with great pride that Wits can claim to be the first university in South Africa to have understood not only the importance of developing nursing as a profession, but also as a potentially valuable academic discipline informed by research and scholarship when it introduced its nursing diploma in 1937. Since 1937, Nursing Education at Wits has grown from strength to strength… Professor Loyiso Nongxa, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, on the occasion of the Department of Nursing’s 70th anniversary. It is perhaps unsurprising that on the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Department of Nursing at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of that institution would speak about the department in such glowing terms. It was, indeed, a department which has had a praiseworthy history. It is a history which highlights many of the issues that shaped the incorporation of nursing education into the university system in South Africa. Yet, this it is also a little known history. The general history of nursing in South Africa has been covered in a fair amount of detail by South African nursing’s formidable “first lady” Searle in her 1965 book The History of the Development of Nursing in South Africa, 1652–1960 [1]. The book, based on her doctoral degree in sociology, pays a great deal of attention to detail but lacks a strong critical analysis that might help us to understand the competing tensions that shaped the nature of nursing education in South Africa over the 20th and into the 21st Centuries. A more nuanced and contextualised history of nursing in South Africa was published in 1994 by the doyen of South
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