History of Nursing profession
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Nursing, profession that assumes responsibility for the continuous care of the sick, the injured, the disabled, and the dying. Nursing is also responsible for encouraging the health of individuals, families, and communities in medical and community settings. Nurses are actively involved in health care research, management, policy deliberations, and patient advocacy. Nurses with postbaccalaureate preparation assume independent responsibility for providing primary health care and specialty services to individuals, families, and communities.
Professional nurses work both independently and in collaboration with other health care professionals such as physicians.
Nursing is the largest, the most diverse, and one of the most respected of all the health care professions.
The demand for nursing remains high, and projections suggest that such demand will substantively increase. Advances in health care technology, rising expectations of people seeking care, and reorganization of health care systems require a greater number of highly educated professionals.
#HistoryOfNursing
Although the origins of nursing predate the mid-19th century, the history of professional nursing traditionally begins with Florence Nightingale. Nightingale, the well-educated daughter of wealthy British parents, defied social conventions and decided to become a nurse. The nursing of strangers, either in hospitals or in their homes, was not then seen as a respectable career for well-bred ladies, who, if they wished to nurse, were expected to do so only for sick family and intimate friends.
In 1854 Nightingale had the opportunity to test her beliefs during Britain’s Crimean War. Newspaper stories reporting that sick and wounded Russian soldiers nursed by religious orders fared much better than British soldiers inflamed public opinion. In response, the British government asked Nightingale to take a small group of nurses to the military hospital at Scutari (modern-day Üsküdar, Turk.). Within days of their arrival, Nightingale and her nurses had reorganized the barracks hospital in accordance with 19th-century science: walls were scrubbed for sanitation, windows opened for ventilation, nourishing food prepared and served, and medications and treatments efficiently administered. Within weeks death rates plummeted, and soldiers were no longer sickened by infectious diseases arising from poor sanitary conditions. Within months a grateful public knew of the work of the “Lady with the Lamp,” who made nightly rounds comforting the sick and wounded. By the end of the 19th century, the entire Western world shared Nightingale’s belief in the worth of educated nurses.
Nightingale’s achievements overshadowed other ways to nurse the sick. For centuries, most nursing of the sick had taken place at home and had been the responsibility of families, friends, and respected community members with reputations as effective healers. During epidemics, such as cholera, typhus, and smallpox, men took on active nursing roles. For example, Stephen Girard, a wealthy French-born banker, won the hearts of citizens of his adopted city of Philadelphia for his courageous and compassionate nursing of the victims of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic.
As urbanization and industrialization spread, those without families to care for them found themselves in hospitals where the quality of nursing care varied enormously. Some patients received excellent care. Women from religious nursing orders were particularly known for the quality of the nursing care they provided in the hospitals they established. Other hospitals depended on recovering patients or hired men and women for the nursing care of patients. Sometimes this care was excellent; other times it was deplorable, and the unreliability of hospital-based nursing care became a particular problem by the late 19th century, when changes in medical practices and treatments required competent nurses.
Hospitals established their own training schools for nurses. In exchange for lectures and clinical instructions, students provided the hospital with two or three years of skilled free nursing care. This hospital-based educational model had significant long-term implications. It bound the education of nurses to hospitals rather than colleges, a tie that was not definitively broken until the latter half of the 20th century. The hospital-based training model also reinforced segregation in society and in the health care system. For instance, African American student nurses were barred from almost all American hospitals and training schools. They could seek training only in schools established by African American hospitals. Most of all, the hospital-based training model strengthened the cultural stereotyping of nursing as women’s work. Only a few hospitals provided training to maintain men’s traditional roles within nursing.
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