May 10, 2023
"No Matter whether this treatment is carried out by sorcerers, priests, doctors, or old women, we find examples of historic ancestry of modern nursing and the earliest forms of the art" - Lavinia L Dock, RN, and Mary Adelaide Nutting, RN, A History of Nursing, 1907
Our Modern Education
In our education systems today we are taught that Florence Nightingale invented Modern Nursing. Every Mainstream source, from Wikipedia to the History Channel, cites Nightingale as the founder of Modern Nursing. Nightingale remains the general's public understanding of Nursing and nursing itself. Which is problematic when understanding the true foundations of Nursing.
The Month of May
May is National Nurses Month because Nightingale's Birthday is May 12th, And the World Health Organization dubbed 2020 the Year of the Nurse and Midwife. Marking Nightingale's 200th Birthday in 2020.
She became famous for advocating for nursing as a trained Profession. Along with her advocacy, she shrank nursing into a restrictive and exclusionary version of nursing that conformed to rigid social morals. Nightingale, an Upper-class lady of Victorian England, who was trained by a group of German Deaconess Nurses. She founded the current image of nursing today but removed the history of how it was developed.
A Victorian corset, which conformed to the modern nursing image as one divided by class, race, and gender- reimagining of nursing palatable to British Colonialism/Imperialism. To capture the true intent of this article it is to give us a reason to redefine the current image of nursing for the next 200 years.
The Mythic Origin Story
The Idea of Nightingale, as the prototypical nurse, the mythic origin story, predominantly white upper-class females in nursing. Striping nursing history of its true broader kaleidoscopic power. The real history of nursing is utterly radical in its vastness. A progressive movement that started before the discovery of germs. It is the history of how humans have grown over centuries to take care of one another in times of need.
Of course, modern professional nursing, with its more scientific knowledge and evidence-based practices, which is very different from traditional nursing. Providing evidence that there is missing context in today's Nursing History. Even when Nursing history is missing from general history books and archeology studies, it still exists. One person from the Victorian Age does not define why people are in nursing today. Problomaticly She should not be used as the Gold Standard of Nursing because we have many new faces now. We can see it sometime only outlined, in relief: in every heroic tale of survival, this is always an invisible hand that stopped the bleeding.
The invisible hand that stopped the pandemic was nurses from today. People should use the pandemic as an opportunity to redefine what makes a Nurse. Only today we have a more diverse and multicultured field which only further encourages us to have a new role model for the next 200 years.
An article on the History of Nursing will be published once we have a fuller understanding of history. This article is to mark the Dangers of Biases in Medicine Today
- Editor JSMG 10191370
The creation of history will always remove fragments of time