history of nursing

History Of Modern American Nursing

When the Crimean War ended in 1856, patient mortality at British hospitals was forty-two percent. Despite the fact that Joseph Lister introduced the concept of antisepsis as early as 1867, the germ theory of disease would not be adopted for another several decades. Nevertheless, already by the end of the American Civil War in 1865, Union hospitals had treated over one million battlefield casualties, with only eight percent mortality. Mainly, historians credit Florence Nightengale, whose campaign for cleanliness and hygiene in hospitals fortuitously predated the crucial implementation of medical antisepsis in modern medicine (Starr, 1984).

Women in Early American Medicine:

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, admission to formal medical education was largely restricted to males until Quakers in Philadelphia founded the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1850. While more than a dozen women's medical schools were subsequently founded by the turn of the century, all but one (the very first founded by the Quakers) were forced to close after the 1910 publication of a report originally entitled "Medical Education in the United

States and Canada," but since known as "The Flexner Report" after Abraham Flexner, secondary school teacher from Kentucky. The only accredited medical institution that admitted women was Johns Hopkins, so women interested in medical careers were essentially relegated to being midwives rather than physicians (Wertz & Wertz, 1979).

Evolution Professional Nursing:

Nursing was practically unknown as a trained profession until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and more often than not, nursing was a task borne by lower class women and even prisoners, since penitentiary inmates were sometimes conscripted into medical service. In many instances, practicing physicians strongly resisted the establishment of any formal training in nursing, out of concern that they would be neither capable nor willing to follow their medical instructions (Starr, 1984).

Ultimately, once upper class females gravitated to the nursing profession, pioneers in the United States followed the example of Florence Nightengale, who managed to help reform British military hospitals by appealing to friends in high places in government. Consequently, nursing began to take shape as a bona-fide skilled occupation in spite of, rather than because of the attitudes and sentiments of American physicians of the late nineteenth century (Starr, 1984).

The Modern Nursing Profession:

Barely a century since women were still completely excluded from the medical profession altogether, nursing has grown into an essential component of modern medicine. Today it is inconceivable to imagine either a modern hospital or even the private medical practitioner's functioning without nurses performing the myriad necessary and vital functions at which they excel by virtue of their advanced training.