Nursing Before and After 1945

Nursing Jobs History Nursing has changed much since the time before 1945 to now. In the Middle Ages, nursing duties and hospital jobs were sponsored by the Catholic Church, which was popular throughout all Europe and which supported the building of hospitals and the care of the sick in communities. This support fell apart during the Protestant Reformation. Monasteries, hospitals and inns were taken from the Church. Also, the study and technique of developing and applying medicine were removed from monasteries and placed in Universities.

The art of nursing which had been passed on for centuries in the monasteries was now cut off from the nurses who had practiced it. Protestant society considered nurses to be among "the lowest level of human society" (Sundstrom, 1998). Over the course of the next 200 years, the public approach to nursing changed. A charitable institution in the Middle Ages, suppressed under the Protestants, it became one in which nurses were paid and nursing became a career, under new management with highly technical and trained jobs.

Yet, even by 1893, nursing was nothing like it is today. Nurses were overworked in less than sanitary conditions and taxed with performing exhausting duties that by today's standards can appear to be macabre: the death of wards was a commonplace and visits to the morgue were frequent. In the words of Mary Roberts Rinehart (1931), "We ran the wards, the private rooms, the operating rooms -- two of them -- the general dispensary, and the eye and ear clinic.

Such a thing as a graduate nurse coming in to care for a private patient was unknown." Nurses oversaw everything all at once. Mary administered to four different wards during night duty and recalls scenes of sickness, dying, disease, troubled minds, violence, and terror. Such scenes are not unknown to nurses today, but at the end of the 19th century, the sense that Rinehart gives is that they were overabundant and that the nurses themselves were often ill-equipped to deal with them.

Technological standards for nursing were greatly different as well. For instance, to light rooms, kerosene lamps were used, penmanship was important (whereas today, everything is computerized). Sanitation jobs were demanded: windows had to be kept clean in order to keep rooms light, and the air had to be kept pure and fresh. Nurses had to make sure rooms were well-ventilated (today, that is the job of the ventilation technician). They had to make sure fires were burning in the sick-room so as to keep it warm.

Most importantly, a nurse was not supposed to "talk." Gossip among nurses was discouraged. In the post-1945 period, nurses began to exercise more voice in the way nursing was practiced. Various associations had been founded and by the 1990s nurses were exercising political clout to influence the way hospitals conducted operations. The jobs of nurses became more specialized and individualized. In fact, today nurses often lack the time to practice the basic job of "comforting" and talking to patients (BMJ Quality and Safety, 2013).

This basic job is even given its own title -- psychoeducational care -- as are many jobs in the nursing practice today. Micromanagement, bureaucracy, and technological increases have turned nurses into little more than administrators. Some functions remain the same: tending to bandages, IVs, medication delivery, routine.