It also hosts an opinion section, long reads, career development information, clinical supplements and an innovation hub.

Many of these would be unfamiliar to nurses today, such as infection control in scarlet fever or typhoid, sea-water injection treatment and important points in rectal feeding.

Readers’ wider interests were also catered for with holiday reports, recipes and information on modern hobbies such as photography and cycling.

Recognising the practical nature of its readers, in 1912 Nursing Times[5] organised one of its earliest competitions – for inventions and ideas.

On 8 August 1914, Nursing Times devoted its editorial page to the solemn news that ‘the cloud which has lain over our country for the past week has now burst, and England is at war with Germany’.

However, the issue moved briskly on to other important matters with a two-page report on the third annual Nursing Times Lawn Tennis Challenge Cup Competition, in which Guy’s Hospital trounced St Georges by 31 games to 26 in front of at least 500 spectators.

In the 1920s Nursing Times[6] had changed little since its launch, and provided an eclectic mix of news, clinical information and articles of general interest and kept readers updated on professional issues.

The medical profession in the 1920s was slowly coming to accept that menstruation was not an illness, according to a Nursing Times report of a BMA meeting in Bradford.

‘Not only could baths and exercise be continued with impunity throughout the normal period, but by such a regimen dysmenorrhoea was usually relieved if not dispelled.’ Clinical articles included the treatment of encephalitis lethargica, a disease that had spread around the world leaving patients with a range of neurological symptoms including enduring coma in severe cases.

As an editorial commented, ‘To abandon her chosen calling for so frivolous a reason seems to show she had quite failed to grasp that willing response to discipline is an essential duty.’ After 35 years in which its appearance had barely changed, Nursing Times[7] updated its look in 1939.

The staid front covers filled with long editorial comment and full-page advertisements were replaced by a black and white photograph and blue surround.

‘An occasional late night spent at the cinema or in the dance-hall hurts nobody – on the contrary it supplies a needed mental fillip.’ The journal also, rather surprisingly, came out in support of smokers.

Although there had been early reports linking smoking with lung cancer, Nursing Times believed: ‘… it certainly does good to tuberculosis persons and diabetics’.

It was not painful to patients and could be applied to sores ‘which are inclined to be septic and have delicate surrounding tissue’ resulting in rapid progress in all cases.

Fun in those days consisted of racing on shingle beaches, having lessons in what appeared to be force nine gales and being put to bed on the promenade.

Perhaps to deter readers from going too wild on their rare nights out the article on syphilis warned sternly that the disease was not only transmitted through sexual intercourse but also ‘by other means, e.g. kissing, the deposition of infective secretion from mouth lesions on cups, glasses etc.’ Although nursing was still a strictly hierarchical profession in which matrons ruled hospitals on military lines, one radical matron questioned whether it had to be like this.

‘Most of us nowadays have a whole or a half day at least once a week, and sometimes Sunday as well.’ What better way could a nurse find to regain her power and drive than to spend a few pence getting right away from bricks and mortar for a long lazy afternoon ‘picnicing [sic] on the grassy slopes amid the most lovely sylvan surroundings’?

Nursing Times published a review of what had happened to the NHS after just two years, saying: ‘One of the first effects of the change-over was the increased demands made upon hospital out-patient departments and in some specialties waiting lists for admission to beds increased.’ It went on to explain the greatest burden of the NHS was being carried by GP services and said: ‘Probably 95% or more of the population are now registered with a general practitioner.

Nurses and auxiliary workers could be invaluable in relieving this need.’ Nursing Times was the magazine of choice for royalty as Queen Mary wrote in March 1950 to then RCN general secretary Frances Goodall saying she welcomed news that the college was to hold an annual celebration of founder’s day of the RCN.

In 1958, the Ministry of Health launched a training film about lifting that featured nurses dressed in swimming costumes so that the ‘movements and strains on the limbs are seen clearly’.

Later that year printers’ strikes meant that the issues of Nursing Times in July had to be reduced to a short newsletter.

A prophetic article was published in Nursing Times[10] in 1960 by Claire Rayner, then an out-patient sister, who regretted the number of women forced to use backstreet abortionists.

The solution, she proposed, was a change in the law ‘making performed therapeutic abortion available to these unhappy girls rather than allowing them to risk their lives in dirty back rooms, at the hands of a bungling amateur’.

Then editor Peggy Nuttall said: ‘Each grade, theoretically at least, will be capable of blocking communications either upwards or downwards and could cut off grade 10 from the patient in the ward and the nurse of student at his bedside.’ Nursing Times launched occasional papers in 1968 – articles ‘beyond the usual length in order that a subject may be explored more fully or in greater depth than is possible in the rest of the editorial pages’.

Nursing Times editor Alison Dunne provoked a storm in 1978 when she wrote about her poor treatment when having her wisdom teeth removed at hospital.

A Nursing Times feature entitle ‘AIDS – A 20th century plague?’ was published in 1983 and warned that the mysterious disease that was striking down gay men in the USA had arrived in the UK.

An editorial said it would ‘tackle some of the longer term and deep-rooted issues that will help to shape the profession in the next decade and beyond.’ In the midst of nationwide industrial action taking place in 1988, a Nursing Times editorial by Niall Dickson said: ‘Action must involve not a few thousand but hundreds of thousands and, above all, it must be targeted at the government without so much as harming a hair on a single patient’s head.’ The 1990s and 2000s saw Nursing Times[13] run many campaigns.

A major demonstration followed, nationwide protests and a survey of 1,000 members of the public showed that 90% of the population supported a 3% rise.

By April 1999, then health secretary Frank Dobson announced for the first time that government would carry out and publish regular surveys to monitor the number of attacks on NHS staff, trusts were told they had to set targets for reducing violence and meet them, and there would be a cross-government drive to cut violence against NHS staff with national guidelines on assaults, covering prevention, publicity, prosecution and sentencing.

This was widely branded as a ‘stalkers’ charter’ and 7,000 Nursing Times readers signed a petition demanding this part of the legislation be changed.