History of nursing in the United States

[1] However D'Antonio shows that in the mid-19th century nursing was transformed from a domestic duty of caring for members of one's extended family, to a regular job performed for a cash wage.

[6] The middle-class women North and South who volunteered provided vitally needed nursing services and were rewarded with a sense of patriotism and civic duty in addition to opportunity to demonstrate their skills and gain new ones, while receiving wages and sharing the hardships of the men.

She was an energetic organizer who established the American Red Cross, which was primarily a disaster relief agency, but which also supported nursing programs.

Richards was officially America's first professionally trained nurse, graduating in 1873 from the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston.

Hospital nursing schools in the United States and Canada took the lead in applying Nightingale's model to their training programs.

For example, Isabel Hampton Robb (1860–1910), as director of the new Johns Hopkins Hospital Training School for Nurses, deliberately set out to use advanced training to upgrade the social status of nursing to a middle class career, instead of a low pay, low status, long hours, and heavy work job for working-class women.

[17] Sandelowski finds that by 1900 physicians were allowing nurses to routinely use the thermometer and stethoscope, and in some cases even the new X-ray machines, microscopes and laboratory testing tools.

[19] In recent decades, professionalization has moved nursing degrees out of RN-oriented hospital schools and into community colleges and universities.

The solution was found by the Rockefeller's General Education Board, which funded new nursing schools headed by Rita E. Miller at Dillard University in New Orleans (1942) and by Mary Elizabeth Lancaster Carnegie at Florida A.

[22] Most larger hospitals operated a school of nursing, which provided minimal training to young women, who in turn worked without pay.

[24] Hospitals were operated by city, state and federal agencies, by churches, by stand-alone non-profits, and by for-profit enterprises run by a local doctor.

[25][26] The Lutheran and Episcopal denominations also entered the health field, especially by setting up orders of women, called deaconesses who dedicated themselves to nursing services.

[27] American Methodists engaged in large-scale missionary activity in Asia and elsewhere in the world, making medical services a priority as early as the 1850s.

[30][31] Historian Nancy Bristow has argued that the great 1918 flu pandemic contributed to the success of women in the field of nursing.

[32] During the Great Depression, federal relief agencies funded many large-scale public health programs in every state, some of which became permanent.

The programs expanding job opportunities for nurses, especially the private duty RNs who suffered high unemployment rates.

[33][34] In the United States, a representative public health worker was Dr. Sara Josephine Baker who established many programs to help the poor in New York City keep their infants healthy, leading teams of nurses into the crowded neighborhoods of Hell's Kitchen and teaching mothers how to dress, feed, and bathe their babies.

Field nurses targeted native women for health education, emphasizing personal hygiene, and infant care and nutrition.

Professionalization was a dominant theme during the Progressive Era, because it valued expertise and hierarchy over ad hoc volunteering in the name of civic duty.

Demobilization reduced the Army and Navy corps to skeleton units designed to be expanded should a new war take place.

[49] President Franklin D. Roosevelt hailed the service of nurses in the war effort in his final "Fireside Chat" of January 6, 1945.

On the other hand, the remarkable advances in medical science and technology and in the organizing, financing, and delivery of patient care had wrought radical transformations since the days of Nightingale and Barton.

Nurses in hospital service and public health were controlled by physicians; those in private practice operated as individuals and had no collective power.

The women who had served in field and evacuation hospitals Europe and the South Pacific ignored the older traditionalists who resented the superior skills and command presence of the new generation.

They had "become accustomed to taking the initiative, making quick decisions, and adopting innovative solutions to a broad range of medical-related problems.

The hospital system fought back, and secured an exemption from the National Labor Relations Act that made unionization very difficult.

The new arrivals organized and formed local groups that merged into the National Federation of Philippines Nurses Associations in the United States.

[65] As outlined in recommendations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, nurses have a high rate of workplace injury, mainly when lifting patients.

The agency recommends eliminating manual lifting in favor of mechanized devices,[66] and in 2015, began an enforcement campaign to force hospitals to do so.

[67] In 1998, nurse Fannie Gaston-Johansson became the first African American woman tenured full professor at Johns Hopkins University.