For many nurses, the skills of nursing or caring lie at the heart of their work. Until the mid-nineteenth century, nursing was not an activity, which was thought to demand either skill or training. Nor did it command respect. As Florence Nightingale was to put it, nursing was left to those 'who were too old, too weak, too drunken, too dirty, too stupid or too bad to do anything else'. The intimate body services to be done for the patient were considered to be unseemly or immodest for young unmarried or well-bred females, especially if not a family member. Cleaning and feeding of another person were regarded as domestic tasks performed by servants.
Also, before 1880, the hospital treatment of illness was fairly rare. Where home services were adequate, a sick person was attended by the family doctor and nursed either by female family members or servants. However, from the middle of the nineteenth century, the discovery and application of anaesthetics and antiseptic surgery advanced medical technique and allowed all classes to seek treatment in hospitals. From the 1860s onwards, a series of nurses' training schools began to produce fairly large numbers of educated women who were eagerly accepted by hospital authorities whose medical officers, patients and public opinion in general were demanding higher levels of nursing skill in the wards. (http://www.gla.ac.uk/faculties/medicine/history/20thcentury/nursing/)
"who were too old, too weak, too drunken, too dirty, too stupid or too bad to do anything else" i think her quote may have held water in her time but by today standard nurses are a lot more respected and looked up too. as a person who just when to hospital not too long ago i feel that the nurses there care more for the patients than the doctors, it makes the experience less streefull.
ReplyDeleteYou can not imagine how these nurses did it with such little equipment and inefficient technology. I could never be a nurse because I am very impatient. What these women did was amazing on how they saved lives. The article is very informing and brushes up on my nurses history.
ReplyDeleteMy mother was a nurse, and is now an administrator. Many of my aunts are nurses, I have cousins who are medics for MASH units, and I'm currently dating a nurse.
ReplyDeleteThere's a joke in there somewhere about filipinos and nurses that you can make on your own.
Suffice to say if there's one industry that has benefited from the integration of technology into it's processes it's the medical/nursing industry.
Just think of how operating theatres transformed from stentorian, cacophonous, macabre slabs where patient mortality was accepted and a thing that just happened to the modern, sterile, well-lit wellness encouraging rooms due to the discovery of microscopic organisms.