The bold title on the cover was well concealed when I read this book in cafés and on trains; I didn't want to be lynched. Like the cover, the book is bold, shocking and thought provoking.

Dickinson contextualises his study in the cultural, legal and psychiatric frameworks around homosexuality in England. He based his main research on oral history interviews of 17 nurses who delivered (or refused to deliver) aversion therapy to ‘treat’ gay men to make them heterosexual, and of 8 men who received the therapy. Aversion therapy included electric shocks and injections of emetics, and was prescribed without research evidence of their effect on sexuality. It caused suffering and in some men resulted in long-term emotional damage. Dickinson describes how men ‘chose’ to receive treatment when often the alternative was prison; the boundary between coercion and choice was uncomfortably ambiguous.

The nurses who were instructed to give the treatment worked in hierarchical mental hospitals where questioning orders was forbidden, rule-breaking could be followed by summary dismissal, and the psychiatrist's prescription was law. A militaristic atmosphere prevailed, especially in the years after the Second World War when mental hospitals attracted many ex-servicemen into the ranks of ‘mental nurses’ (a term Dickinson uses in its historical sense and carefully defines). With gender segregation in these hospitals, some men were comfortably and openly gay. Nevertheless, some gay nurses justified carrying out the interventions on other gay men.

Dickinson delves into the relationships between nurses and doctors, between senior and junior nurses, between consent and coercion, and discusses how popular culture, the media and stereotypes inevitably affect staff attitudes to their patients and influence clinical practice.

This is an extremely important, well researched and well written book. Although it is primarily a historical account of the lives and work of mental nurses in the mid-20th century, it is pertinent to staff in all clinical disciplines in mental health services today. Dickinson makes it impossible not to reflect on the ethical predicaments in which staff can be placed and his book has implications for our own practices, assumptions, expectations and cultures of care. History can encourage reflection on difficult subjects, and the bygone context can permit this in a relatively unthreatening way. Curing Queers reminds us that it is vital to consider the principle of ‘first do no harm’, to seek out the evidence base for new treatments and to question practices which can harm our patients.