Nursing: Today and Throughout HistoryThe occupation of nursing has been around for almost all of history in some form or another. In the ancient Roman Empire are found records of the nursing practice, where nurses provided care to in-patients at local Roman hospitals. In Constantinople—the Rome of the East—nurses were “known as hypourgoi” (Kourkouta, 1998). These nurses (both male and female) were tasked with jobs much like today’s nurses: they provided a wide variety of services to patients. Kourkouta (1998) states that the main tasks of the hypourgoi (male nurses) and hypourgisses (female nurses) were to give “psychological support of patients, everyday care of patients’ bodily needs and elementary comfort, cleaning of patients and providing them with proper food, the administration of medicines according to a doctor’s instructions, supervising wards when the physicians were not present, the performance of enemas, cuppings and bloodletting, the main therapeutic means used at that time, [and] the placing of patients on the operating table and the performance of minor operations” (p. 32). In short, nurses demonstrated very many of the same values and attitudes required of them in the profession today—but this should not be surprising,...
Christianity in the West and Islam in the Middle East helped to spread the practice of nursing (Jan, 1996; Kourkouta, 1998). In the modern era, however, nursing shifted into more of a secular practice and in the West, Florence Nightingale served as the model nurse for the modern era. As the nursing practice developed in the West with more and more focus on institutionalized education, standards, and accreditation being implemented into the teaching of curriculum, nursing took on a more pronounced dimension. In particularly, advanced practice nurses were called upon to fill the gap left by physicians who were leaving the primary care field for more specialized medicine (O’Brien, 2003).
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, doctors collaborated with and trained nurses to offer primary care to these patients (O’Brien, 2003). By 1965, the U.S. provided Medicare and Medicaid to health care patients whose low income meant they were unable to pay for health care. By subsidizing…
