Nursing: Years Ago and Today

The history of breast feeding, a segment of the livid snitch serve well sector, reflects the world(a) trends in the transformation of grow that gave rise to the freshly, dependent, salaried, white collar work beat back, in conflict all over the construct of craftalism. Although previously freelancer practitioners, by the end of World War II, a decisive mass of nurses were forced to find employment in the newly emerging bureaucratic infirmarys as their opportunities for autonomous nurse- unhurried of relationships diminished (Melosh 32).In the nations hospitals, nurses were subject to processes of bureaucratic on a lower floorstand very much like those described by Edwards for twain ware and nonproduction workers (Edwards 17). Invisible mechanisms of control, including the human capital nonion of professionalism and the use of written rules to rank nurses tasks and supervision, were invoked to discipline this white collar workforce. Historically, nurses responses to these constraints have been filled with conflict.In the eighteenth century, nursing was merely another(prenominal) of womens domestic chores. By the untimely 19th century, however, nursing had emerged as an occupation performed by respectable labour women, primarily widows and spinsters. It was a specialty within domestic service, consisting primarily of clean a patients clay, linen, and dressings. This kind of labor was considered by most 19th-century men and women as an extension of womans natural biological capacity for domesticity, docility, nurturance, and willingness to sacrifice (Berg 21).A comely line separated the 19th-century nurse from the domestic servant, as some(prenominal) were evaluate to perform household chores. By 1868, however, they were more than clearly differentiated by salary the nurse earn $1.00 to $2.00 a day whereas the servant earned only $2.22 per week (Reverby 9). Because of the close association with dirty domestic work, few materialistic w omen entered nursing. Until the cultured War, nursing remained an occupation performed by short(p), aged(a), single women with no formal education or training. These women were often drawn from rural areas into the cities in search of paid work, where their options were generally sewing, lodging borders, domestic service, or nursing. By 1870, there were over 10,000 women officially employed as nurses in the unite States.Until the 20th century, hospital nursing was less prevalent than household nursing since most births, deaths, and illnesses occurred in the home. The majority of Americans did not see the inside of a hospital until the turn of the century. hospitals were barely hospitals as we now know them. They were pitying institutions built by philanthropists at the end of the 18th century for the poor, the tenderly marginal, or the unemployed. Indeed, many hospitals evolved out of creation almshouses.Patients in both public and voluntary hospitals were incarcerated for d ependence as much as for indisposition in the 1870s (Vogel 105), and their hospital stay was often for weeks or months, not days. Impermeable walls and restrained gates surrounded the institutions, enabling hospitals to assert some control over the working class, immigrant, or destitute patient.Although benevolent, hospitals treated their patients disdainfully, with authoritarianism and paternalism. Their purpose was to tolerate the patient with moral uplift mend in hush uping kind control. Hospital administrators believed their patients were from the very lowest from abodes of drunkenness and vice in almost both form, where the most depressing and corrupting influences were acting on both body and mind (Vogel 24).Children were decontaminated upon arrival and taught discipline, purity and kindness. The trustees hoped this regimen would reform the children, who would then commence newly refined manners, quickened intellect and softened hearts back to their homes. approximately hospitals attempted to reform adults as well because they believed society benefited not dear by saving these workers but also by rekindling in them their confidence in social order (Vogel 26).Nurses in these hospitals were generally ambulatory patients themselves, caring for fellow inmates. If not actual patients, hospital nurses originated from the equivalent poor and proletariat sectors of society as the patients. They often held several jobs simultaneously and were frequently reprimanded for sewing-out (manufacturing garments on the ward) while on duty (Reverby 24).The status of the 19th-century hospital nurse was very low, comparable to the status of all female patients at this time. The female patient of 1870 was characterized in a letter to the Boston Evening Transcript as a woman who has fallen into the sins of the wayside too weak to differ the temptations which have beset their unguarded footsteps (Vogel 26). Similarly, the hospital nurse was characterized by Flore nce Nightingale, the 19th-century British reformer, as too old, too weak, too drunk, too dirty, too unintellectual or too bad to do anything else (Reverby 26). Hence, stringent rules governing general behaviors regarding sex, language, and use of alcohol and tobacco were enforced for both patients and nurses in the hospital.Although nurses lived in close proximity to the patients, they were forbidden to socialize with them. In order to keep on them from socializing or drinking with the patients, nurses were kept busy from 500 a.m. until 930 p.m. They were continually scrubbing patients, garments, and wards, since sanitation was the only method of disease prevention in the 19th-century hospital. When they had completed these tasks, they were given innumerable others to keep them in line.In addition to such domestic tasks, nurses were often responsible for providing more serious health distribute in the doctors frequent absence as well. They often managed labor and delivery cases i ndependently. This forced nurses to exercise independent aesculapian judgments, despite doctors prevailing expectation that nurses would be completely subservient to them. With the smell of autonomy, nurses began to expect greater latitude in their work. They began to see themselves as adult wage workers, not children to be controlled by the hospital family, as the hospital trustees portrayed the workplace.The face of nursing changed during the Civil War. Middle- and upper-class women, motivated by patriotism, familial duty, or simply a search for meaningful work, began to work in hospitals, nursing wounded men, and raising funds for the war (Mottus 65).The insanitary and disorganized conditions in regular force hospitals led to the emergence of relief associations. In 1861 the Womens Central Association of Relief was formed with the explicit purpose of furnishing comfort and checkup stores, and especially nurses in aid of the medical staff of the army and to take measures for securing a system of well trained nurses against any potential demand of war (Mottus 24). Drawing on Nightingales British model of army nursing, the Registration Committee on Nurses sought prospective applicants with specific qualifications they were to come apart dresses without hoops, provide references confirming their naughty moral character, and be no older than 45 years of age. Nurses trained according to Nightingales nursing model, learning the laws of both morality and hygiene.The post-Civil War years, characterized by remarkable economic growth, the rise of industrial corporations, the decline of small entrepreneurs, and the emergence of urban America, engendered the expansion of relief organizations and the instruction of new charity organizations. Both were controlled in large part by middle- and upper-class female reformers.These women, many of whom had participated in organized nursing during the Civil War, focused on reforming the moral character of the poor, soile d by the ravages of urban society (Lubove 4-5). The expansion of the charity organization movement represented another response by a troubled middle class to the social dislocation of the post-Civil War industrial city Charity organization was a crusade to save the city from itself and from the evils of pauperism and class antagonism. It was an instrument of social control for the conservative middle class (Lubove 5).In the post-Civil War hospital, bourgeois women joined forces with hospital trustees and developed training schools for nurses. The reformers purpose was to save the soil girl from the city, foster a profession of nursing, and reform the hospital. They attempted to select out this goal by developing a cadre of trained, professional, middle-class nurses. The hospital trustees, however, sought nurses as a cheap labor force for the hospital.During the depression years of the mid-nineties, the hospital moved away from being a charity organization (Rosner 119). Philanthro pists, affected by financial crises themselves, were no extended able to be the sole supporters of the institutions. Hospital trustees turned to the middle-class patient as a new source of income for hospitals. This change motivated trustees to commute the hospitals architecture as well as its workforce. Its image became more hotel-like, with undercover rooms, hugger-mugger doctors, and private nurses.The reformers convinced the trustees that young, enlightened nurses of middle-class origins would be more appropriate caretakers for wealthier patients than untrained, working-class nurses. Hence, while the middle-class reformers were attempting to create a profession for respectable middle-class women, embodying Victorian Americas idealized vision of upper-class adult female (empathy, gentility, and dedication to service), the trustees were still seeking an inexpensive yet disciplined workforce. The middle-class student nurse was their answer.One of the first training schools for nurses emerged in 1889 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital as a joint effort between the women reformers and the hospital trustees. They sought applications from Episcopalian and Presbyterian daughters of the clergy and the professions (James 214). The reformers hoped such a school would become the new social incubator for daughters of the new middle class. They sought only educated and refined students women who had previously worked in the mills or domestic service were discouraged from applying. The reformers argued that only women with proper, virtuous backgrounds could enhance the moral atmosphere of the hospital.bookman nurse training meant working 13-hour days at domestic duties under strict military discipline. Understaffing and medical emergency continually forced students into positions for which they were unprepared. These poor work conditions of overwork, lack of adequate training, bad food, and arbitrary discipline took their damage on the students, resulting in the 1910s i n strikes against nursing supervisors (Reverby 37).During the 1930s and into the 1940s the private duty market collapsed altogether (Melosh 197). The new array of hospital techniques for both patients and nurses fostered a new role for some nurses, however that of hospital foreman, oversee a new hierarchy of subsidiary nurses. The nursing professionalizers urged hospital administrators to guide educated alum nurses of middle-class origins for these positions. Administrators were not hard to persuade on this point since they were able to hire nurses with more education and experience for the same wage as the student nurse, given depression-era unemployment.At first, grateful for work, graduate nurses accepted this condition. In time, however, graduate nurses responded to this situation with unrest, high rates of absenteeism, and turnover. Conflicts between adherents of the more elitist, human capital interpretation of professionalism and proponents of the need to work glide by to resonate from staff and head nurses today. Many staff nurses claim that also taking care of patients, theyre working to put shoes on their childrens feet and nursing administrators just dont see that they work to support their flavour outside the hospital too. Such a comment was just as appropriate in the 1880s as it was in 1985. The same debates still rage on.Besides, there are both current health care issues facing the profession of nursing today a misdistribution of nurses across the fall in States and burnout, both noted as causes for a nursing shortage. There is a misdistribution of nurses across the United States and there are at least two apparent reasons for this geographic immobility and a lack of incentives for rural and inner-city hospitals. treat is a very demanding and stressful profession.Burnout is described by Annette T. Vallano in Your life story in Nursing, as a form of mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and interpersonal exhaustion that is not easily r estored by sleep or rest. Nurses experience burnout when they are overwhelmed and inefficient to cope with the day-to-day stress of their work over long periods of time. Burnout may also be a reason that many nurses have stubborn to work only part-time, thus burnout may be a bestow factor to the nursing-shortage problem.All in all, nursing has evolved from the days of Florence Nightingale to a highly respected and educated profession. But there are challenges for the future. In short, the nursing profession needs to begin to recognize new trends and patterns (Lowenstein1), while also recognizing it is crucial that nurses learn to generate new ideas for care, utilizing the new medical and communication technologies that are blossoming daily, but also keeping our high touch together with the high tech (Lowenstein 1).Works citedEdwards, Richard. Contested Terrain The break of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century. current York Basic Books. 1979.Berg, Barbara. The Remembered Gate Origins of American Feminism The Woman and the City, 1800-1860. New York Oxford University Press. 1978.James, Janet. Isabel Hampton and the Professionalization of Nursing in the 1890s. In Charles Rosenberg and Morris Vogel (eds.), The Therapeutic Revolution. Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press. 1979.Lowenstein, Arlene. Vision for the future of nursing. ICUS NURS WEB J, 16, Oct/ declination 2003 http//www.nursing.gr/editorialLowenstein.pdf.Lubove, Roy. The Professional Altruist The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1880-1930. Cambridge Harvard University Press. 1965.Melosh Barbara. The Physicians Hand Work Culture and Conflict in American Nursing. Philadelphia synagogue University Press. 1982.Mottus, Jane E. New York Nightingales The Emergence of the Nursing Profession at Bellevue and New York Hospital, 1850-1920. Ann pergola University Microfilms International. 1980.Reverby, Susan. Ordered to Care The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850-1945. New York Cambridge Unive rsity Press. 1987.Rosner, David. A at a time Charitable Enterprise Hospitals and Health Care in Brooklyn and New York, 1885-1915. New York Cambridge University Press. 1986.Vallano, Annette. Your Career in Nursing. Kaplan 3rd edition. January 3, 2006.Vogel, Morris. The Invention of the Modern Hospital, Boston, 1870-1930. gelt University of Chicago Press. 1980.