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Florence Nightingale
- 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.
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In both histories of nursing and medical education, we are now asked to explore how materials taught in classrooms, memorized from texts, and practiced on wards refract and reinforce heretofore invisible assumptions and biases about what kinds of knowledge — validated by the social and racialized positions of those acknowledged as experts ...
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- History of nursing
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. Professional nurses supervise the work of nurses who have limited licenses, such as licensed practical nurses (LPNs) in the United States and enrolled nurses (ENs) in Australia. Professional nurses also oversee the work of nursing assistants in various settings.
Nursing is the largest, the most diverse, and one of the most respected of all the health care professions. There are more than 2.9 million registered nurses in the United States alone, and many more millions worldwide. While true demographic representation remains an elusive goal, nursing does have a higher proportional representation of racial and ethnic minorities than other health care professions. In some countries, however, men still remain significantly underrepresented.
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. Demographic changes, such as large aging populations in many countries of the world, also fuel this demand.
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 a radical departure from these views, Nightingale believed that well-educated women, using scientific principles and informed education about healthy lifestyles, could dramatically improve the care of sick patients. Moreover, she believed that nursing provided an ideal independent calling full of intellectual and social freedom for women, who at that time had few other career options.
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.
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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. The convergence of hospitals’ needs, physicians’ wishes, and women’s desire for meaningful work led to a new health care professional: the trained nurse.
Jun 24, 2021 · Discover the history of nurse education, the origins of nursing and its evolution into one of the most respected health care professions.
By 1960, approximately 172 college-based nursing education programs awarded Bachelors of Science in Nursing degrees. These experts believed baccalaureate educated nurses would be better prepared to care for the complex needs of late-twentieth-century patients and would be able to take on more advanced roles in the delivery of health care.
Nov 5, 2012 · Most American nurses received on-the-job training in hospital diploma schools. Nursing students were unpaid, giving hospitals a source of free labor. This created what many nurse historians and policy analysts see as a system that continues to undervalue nursing?s contribution to acute care.
This history has often been written from the stance of educators deeply concerned about the inability of the profession to control the many different educational routes to nursing practice. Its sources have been a long list of twentieth century reports on the status and future of nursing education.
Discover AACN's rich history and legacy of nursing education and advocacy. Learn about our founding, milestones, and accomplishments over the past 50 years as a leading voice in nursing.
