The world's first nursing school founded in India about 250 B.C. Only men were considered "pure" enough to become nurses.
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The term "nosocomial" meaning "hospital-acquired" stems from the nosocomi, the men who provided nursing care in ancient Rome.
In 300 A.D., a group of men, the Parabolani, started a hospital providing nursing care during the Black Plague epidemic.
St. Benedict founded the Benedictine nursing order, while St. Alexis was in the fifth century. Military, religious and lay orders of men including the Knights Hospitalers, the Teutonic Knights, the Knights of St. Lazarus and the Hospital Brothers of St. Anthony provided nursing care during the Middle Ages.
The Alexian Brothers began as informal groups of laymen about 1300 A.D., providing nursing care for the poor.
St. John of God (1495-1550) devoted his life to serving the ill and mistreated and was canonized in 1690. St. Camillus (1510-1614) is credited with developing the first field ambulance. He was canonized in 1746. The symbol of his order, the red cross, remains the primary symbol of health care. In 1930, St. Camillus and St. John of God were named co-patron saints of nursing.
Seventy years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, Friar Juan de Mena was shipwrecked off the south Texas coast. He is the first identified nurse in what was to become the U.S.
The Crimean War started in 1853. A biographer of Florence Nightingale, regarded as the first modern female nurse, noted that male "orderlies" provided nursing care prior to and after Nightingale's arrival at the Crimean front.
In 1859, Dunant provided nursing care after the Battle of Solferino. He was helped found the International Red Cross and the Geneva Convention. He won the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.
During the U.S. Civil War, both sides had military men serving as nurses. Men were the majority of the front line nurses while female nurses were typically restricted to general hospitals in the major cities.
Both the Crimean War and the U. S. Civil War decimated the male population. Without men to help with the labor, many women were unable to continue farming and moved to cities and became "matrons" in military hospitals. The military continued to primarily use men as nurses.
In 1866, the Alexians built their first hospital in Chicago, Illinois and in 1869, opened a second hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. Today their work continues around the world.
In 1898 the U.S. fought a brief war with Spain. The Daughters of the American Revolution recruited contract female physicians and nurses during the war.
The Mills School for Nursing and St. Vincent's Hospital School for Men were founded in New York in 1888. The Pennsylvania Hospital opened a school for female nurses in 1914 and simultaneously opened a separate men's nursing school.
In 1901, the Army Nurse Corps was formed. Only women could serve as nurses and military nursing changed from being predominately male to exclusively female.
During World War I and World War II there were nursing shortages and women were given tuition, room, board, uniforms, and a stipend to attend nursing school, but were not required to enter the service.
In a time when few men were practicing nursing in the U.S., two men worked to promote men in nursing. Leroy N. Craig, superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital men's nursing school, fought for the rights of men to participate in the American Nurses Association. Nurse Luther Christman volunteered to serve on the front if he could serve as a nurse. Christman was turned down for combat duty as a nurse by the U.S. Surgeon General.
Not until 1955, after the Korean War, were men again permitted to serve as military nurses. During the intervening decades, men who were registered nurses enlisted or drafted, but were not assigned as nurses.
Men were forbidden to attend some state-supported nursing schools until 1982.
The American Assembly For Men in Nursing, organized in 1971, supports and promotes men in American nursing. Originally named the National Male Nurse Association, the organization became the American Assembly For Men in Nursing in 1980. Source: Bruce Wilson, Ph.D., RN, associate professor at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg, Texas, and a former board member of the American Assembly For Men in Nursing.
Two thousand years ago, nursing school was for men only.
Only men were considered "pure" enough to enter what is thought to be the world's first nursing school, which was founded in India about 250 B.C., according to Bruce Wilson, Ph.D., RN, and associate professor at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg, Texas.
For the next two millennia, nursing remained male-dominated. It took warfare in the 19th and 20th centuries to transform nursing from being considered a man's job to a women's profession.
One of the biggest shifts in the profession came in 1901 when the military nursing corps was reorganized.
Men were no longer allowed to serve as nurses, furthering the process of the feminization of nursing, said Wilson, who is also the manager of the American Assembly For Men in Nursing's Web site.
Hello,
I registered only to get a useful reference about James Derham.
I'm studying nursing in Stockholm Karolinska, and wish to get something more about nursing history than "digest" from nightingale.
Is there a book that describe in detail Derham's life ? A book that I can use as a reference.
Aaron86 said:It is interesting how, according to nursing school, the nursing pofession always seems to start with nightingale.I was not aware that nursing was a predominately male practice before the civil war.
Very useful information
Despite the good that Florence did for the nursing profession, along with it came some things that were not-so-good. For example, the belief and subsequent stereotyping of nurses as female and a handmaiden or servant to the physician. This had many long standing ramifications that are still being fought back against today.
One of the best things that could happen to nursing today, as a profession, is for the general public to be educated to the fact that nursing has only been female dominated over the last century or so. There are many advantages of a heterozygous nursing culture that we are unable to take advantage of because of the sexual polarity within the profession and public education could go a long way towards resolving this issue.
It is time we move past the sexism and advance our profession to the truly enlightened status that it deserves.
SO GLAD to see this on here. Probably no one but male nurses is reading it, which is too bad... I HATE the exclusive emphasis on Florence Nightingale, like she was the only person from the dawn of time, to ever start organized caregiving! Florence Nightingale is NOT why I went into nursing. As a nurse and as a woman, I think the emphasis on her holds the profession back.
I think one of my favorite male nurses do to the depth of his compassion was Walt Whitman 1819-1892. He became a nurse after seeing the wounded after a battle in the Civil War while looking for his brother. He served as a nurse to the US Army out of Washington DC and his remembrances of those time are detailed in his work Specimen days which can be read in full
https://www.bartleby.com/229/index.html#I These are just short insights he made during the civil war.
AN interesting article that weaves Whiman in with Barton and Dix and Nursing at that time.
https://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_7.html
"But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed , came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed , he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more , when I come again , I will repay thee." - (Luke 10:33-35)
This was not only one of the first examples of male nursing, but also the dawn of co-pay and emergency transport, AND patients confusing a hospital with a hotel....
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@dong bagohan
There's a great thread on your predicament. Navigate to Nursing Discussions By Region/International Nursing/Philippine Nursing Forum/To All Pinoy RN's - Pls Read !!! Useful links there, too.