1950s nursing

BabyRN2Be · Apr 6, 2005

The following job description was given to floor nurses by a hospital in 1887:
In addition to caring for your 50 patients, each nurse will follow these regulations:
Daily sweep and mop the floors of your ward, dust the patient's furniture and window sills.
Maintain an even temperature in your ward by bringing in a scuttle of coal for the day's business.
Light is important to observe the patient's condition. Therefore, each day fill kerosene lamps, clean chimneys and trim wicks. Wash the windows once a week.
The nurse's notes are important in aiding the physician's work. Make your pens carefully; you may whittle nibs to your individual taste.
Each nurse on day duty will report every day at 7 a.m. and leave at 8 p.m. except on the Sabbath on which day you will be off from 12 noon to 2 p.m.
Graduate nurses in good standing with the director of nurses will be given an evening off each week for courting purposes or two evenings a week if you go regularly to church.
Each nurse should lay aside from each pay day a goodly sum of her earnings for her benefits during her declining years so that she will not become a burden. For example, if you earn $30 a month you should set aside $15.
Any nurse who smokes, uses liquor in any form, gets her hair done at a beauty shop, or frequents dance halls will give the director of nurses good reason to suspect her worth, intentions and integrity.
The nurse who performs her labors and serves her patients and doctors without fault for five years will be given an increase of five cents a day, providing there are no hospital debts outstanding.

Yeah, this list was also given to teachers and has been made up to suit various other professions in "1887". While some of it might be true, I think it's a hoax. Actually, I've confirmed that the one for teachers is a hoax and someone just adapted the list for the nursing profession. Check the link below and compare the two lists:

http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1872rule.htm

Makes for fun reading though. :)

JessicaInOr · Apr 10, 2005

in the eighties we did blood sugar checks by dropping a drop of blood on these blue strips that would change colors. you'd have to compare the ehues on the bottle to estimate your blood sugar.

I remember those. I was working in a SNF and sent a patient to the ER because of an amazingly high BS.

That was the day I discovered I am color deficient. His actual BS was 120. Who knew? :chuckle

Lucky for me the patient was cool about the whole thing. VA wasn't.

JessicaInOr · Apr 10, 2005

Thanks to those who replied.....lets keep the thread coming. I loved reading about the 1887 Nursing roles and the doctors office visit of the 1950s---how things have changed!
Sean....new RN as of June 2004 Med/surg

A friend brought her grandmother's nursing text book to work one day. Chapter 1 was full of recipes, the nurses cooked the food too.

Chapter 2 was how to treat the doc, he is to be treated with total respect.

Jamesdotter · Apr 10, 2005

in the eighties we did blood sugar checks by dropping a drop of blood on these blue strips that would change colors. you'd have to compare the ehues on the bottle to estimate your blood sugar.

Before the blue strips there were Clinitest tablets. And before the Clinitest tablets there was Benedict's Solution. In a test tube, place 5 cc's of Benedict's reagent and 8 drops of urine, boil in a water bath for 5 minutes and read the color--from blue (negative) through green, yellow to a red precipitate (more than 2%). You can imagine how difficult this was for many patients to do at home. And some of our patients didn't have any way to heat a water bath.

We also checked for acetone--1 Gm of reagent, in a test tube and add 5 cc of urine. shake until the reagent dissolves, then drip an ammonia solution down the side of the test tube to form a layer at the surface of the urine-reagent solution. We estimated the amount of acetone by the size of the purple ring that formed in the presence of acetone (it was a pretty color, lol).

We blessed the people who developed Clinitest and Acetest tablets. The Clinitest provided its own heat and we just put a drop of urine on the Acetest tab (do they still use those?)

oneillk1 · Apr 10, 2005

Let's see how my memory banks are working
Nurses didn't routinely take blood pressures in the 40's and early 50's as that was considered part of the practise of medicine.
Patient assessmens, ie listening to lung and heart sounds ,didn't become widespread untill the 70's.
When ICU/CCU first came about nurses had to wait for the MD to come before giving antiarrhythmic drugs IV, in fact in many places RN couldn't give any drug IV. Unless of course you were a CRNA.
CRNA's gave virtually all of the anesthesia agents as anesthesia before te 1960's was considered a Nurses job and not an area a MD should do.
If an MD came onto the floor the nurse had to stand, give up her chair to the MD, open the door for MD, stop using the chart and give it to te MD.
You had to play the "nurse doctor game" to get an order changed or one you felt the patient neded.
There was no such thing as every other weekend off.
Nurses like children were to be seen and definetly not heard.
Metal bedpans and hoppers.
Bed rest for weeks after an MI or birth.
I'm sure there is more, keep them coming

Oh my gosh I think that New Zealand is definitely still in the dark ages.

In NZ...

Nurses do not regularly use stethescopes in their daily work unless they are in a specialist area.

Nurses don't do physical patient assessments all that often, they wait for the doctor to come and assess the patient, or when the nurse has assesed the patient and gives the doc their findings, the doctor ignores it and repeats the assessment.

We still have some metal bedpans around.

Some places still regularly use mercury thermometers.

We constantly play the Doctor nurse game.

kmrmom42 · Apr 10, 2005

What a fun thread this has been. Walking down memory lane can be fascinating.

I became a nurse later in life, but i have worked in health care since 1971 and both my mother and mother-in-law were nurses.

My mother-in-law's memories were the oldest (graduated in 1932). She remembered things like washing gloves, washing and rolling bandages, glass syringes, and she worked in Med/Surg and OB which were separated only by a set of swinging doors (and this was years after Lister!)

My father in law was a doctor. He had photographs of himself in the operating "theater" that were absolutely astounding when compared with todays ORs.

My mother went to Children's Hospital School of Nursing in Boston and graduated pregnant with me in 1956. They wore blue pinstripe dresses of stiff fabric covered by a starched white apron. They wore black stockings and black shoes. and, of course, white caps. The caps were little square things with a black velvet ribbon on them. The students were used as "slave labor" as someone else mentioned in this thread. She worked long, hard days but when she was finished she was experienced enough to become the house supervisor within a year or so after she graduated. My mother had to get special approval to marry my father because the students all lived in nursing quarters owned by the school and they were not supposed to be married. However, my grandfather was dying and my Mom wanted him to walk her down the aisle. So my mother and father married and my Dad went back to his Sargeants quarters at Ft Bragg in NC and my Mom went back to her nurses quarters. Obviously there was a leave eventually that allowed for my conception. My mother tried to hide this for a while but she was VERY thin and the bump in her belly and the swelling of her ankles gave her away. They let her stay though.

My early experiences in health care were in nursing homes. We sat at the desk and smoked, nurse's aides were not certified and we learned on the job. We did far more than nurse's aides do today, including charting. Some of my co-workers charts were hilarious to read and made for a fun downtime activity. "Helped Mable put her girdle on. It was tight but we got it on" LOL

We did enemas, tube feedings, douches, decubiti treatments (anyone remember Maalox?), and much more. When I think of it now I cringe at what I was allowed to do as a naive teenager.

Childbirth has changed a lot too. My Mom gave birth to me under the influence of scopolamine. She had told the staff that she didn't want it but they came in, rolled her over and jabbed her butt without her permission. (Nowadays that would be assault). The kicked my father out, actually sent him HOME, took my mothers glasses away and would not return them when she asked (she is legally blind without them). After I was born they put her in a long ward of postpartum women and announced to them that my mother was a pediatric nurse and that since they were short staffed they could direct their newborn questions to her!

Anyway, I have lots more stories....like many of us I feel I could write a book. However, I think that is enough. Thanks for starting this thread.

Have a great day everyone!

(Addendum:Finishing my MSN this week!! HOORAY! )

Maverick80 · Apr 10, 2005

this information is absolutely amazing...it's crazy how nursing has evolved in just in the 20th century!!

crazylilkelly · Apr 21, 2005

* X-rays and stethoscopes were the typical "diagnostic" equipment. There wa a lot more "hands on" doctoring, and emphasis on diagnosing based upon what the physician saw, heard, felt, smelled...and I'm not sure when physicians stopped tasting urine (don't know if it was before or after the 1940s) for diabetes.

Are you serious, Docs used to TASTE their patient's urine????? I wonder how many docs got ill from doing that? :eek:

PicklesRN, RN · Apr 21, 2005

* X-rays and stethoscopes were the typical "diagnostic" equipment. There wa a lot more "hands on" doctoring, and emphasis on diagnosing based upon what the physician saw, heard, felt, smelled...and I'm not sure when physicians stopped tasting urine (don't know if it was before or after the 1940s) for diabetes.
Are you serious, Docs used to TASTE their patient's urine????? I wonder how many docs got ill from doing that?

That was their version of glucose monitoring.

Amazing, isn't it? The way things were just 50-75 years ago seems like eons of research time. But it isn't, just 50-75 years.

kmrmom42 · Apr 21, 2005

* X-rays and stethoscopes were the typical "diagnostic" equipment. There wa a lot more "hands on" doctoring, and emphasis on diagnosing based upon what the physician saw, heard, felt, smelled...and I'm not sure when physicians stopped tasting urine (don't know if it was before or after the 1940s) for diabetes.
Are you serious, Docs used to TASTE their patient's urine????? I wonder how many docs got ill from doing that?

There is a funny joke about that:

Retrieved from http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~abhu000/diabetes/tidbits.html

Tidbits

A joke from the late 1940's

It is recounted that at King's College in the Strand around the time of the war, the Chief of Services would inevitably begin the year's rounds by teaching "a singularly important principle of medicine." He asked a nurse to fetch him a sample of urine. He then talked at length about diabetes mellitus. "Diabetes," he said, "is a greek name; but the Romans noticed that the bees like the urine of diabetics, so they added the word mellitus which means sweet as honey. Well, as you know, you may find sugar in the urine of a diabetic..."

By now, the nurse had returned with a sample of urine which the registrar promptly held up like a trophy. We stared at that straw colored fluid as if we had never seen such a thing before. The registrar then startled us. He dipped a finger boldly into the urine, then licked his finger with the tip of his tongue. As if tasting wine, he opened and closed his lips rapidly. Could he perhaps detect a faint taste of sugar? The sample was passed on to us for an opinion. We all dipped a finger into the fluid, all of us foolishly licked that finger.

"Now," said the Registrar grinning, "you have learned the first principle of diagnosis. I mean the power of observation."

We were baffled. We stood near the sluice room outside the ward, and in the distance, some anonymous patient was explosively coughing.

"You see," the registrar said continuing triumphantly, "I dipped my MIDDLE finger into the urine, but licked my INDEX finger, not like all you chaps."

There is more factual information here:

http://www.diabetesliving.com/basics/wiley.htm

Thought someone might be interested.

crazylilkelly · Apr 21, 2005

There is a funny joke about that:
Retrieved from http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~abhu000/diabetes/tidbits.html
Tidbits
A joke from the late 1940's
It is recounted that at King's College in the Strand around the time of the war, the Chief of Services would inevitably begin the year's rounds by teaching "a singularly important principle of medicine." He asked a nurse to fetch him a sample of urine. He then talked at length about diabetes mellitus. "Diabetes," he said, "is a greek name; but the Romans noticed that the bees like the urine of diabetics, so they added the word mellitus which means sweet as honey. Well, as you know, you may find sugar in the urine of a diabetic..."
By now, the nurse had returned with a sample of urine which the registrar promptly held up like a trophy. We stared at that straw colored fluid as if we had never seen such a thing before. The registrar then startled us. He dipped a finger boldly into the urine, then licked his finger with the tip of his tongue. As if tasting wine, he opened and closed his lips rapidly. Could he perhaps detect a faint taste of sugar? The sample was passed on to us for an opinion. We all dipped a finger into the fluid, all of us foolishly licked that finger.
"Now," said the Registrar grinning, "you have learned the first principle of diagnosis. I mean the power of observation."
We were baffled. We stood near the sluice room outside the ward, and in the distance, some anonymous patient was explosively coughing.
"You see," the registrar said continuing triumphantly, "I dipped my MIDDLE finger into the urine, but licked my INDEX finger, not like all you chaps."
There is more factual information here:
http://www.diabetesliving.com/basics/wiley.htm
Thought someone might be interested.

:lol_hitti :rotfl:

krisssy · Apr 22, 2005

:lol_hitti :rotfl:

I attended a university as a nursing major from 1965-1969. I graduated with a BS degree in nursing and passed my state boards. I think university programs were just beginning to get popular at that time. There were still loads of hospital diploma programs which I almost attended. Looking back now, I wish I had attended a hospital based school and then gone on to receive my BSN after that.

In my opinion, I was not prepared to be a nurse when I graduated. We had clinicals twice a week, were given one patient, and the patient was not very sick. I never had a patient with an IV. Maybe all those patients were in ICU. I don't know. I never used a stethoscope, and I was never taught to do an assessment. I never withdrew blood, and of course I never started an IV, as I never had a patient with one, and the doctors did those things anyway. I had one patient, and all I remember doing was talking to the patient offering TLC, giving meds which were oral or by injection only( I only gave two injections in 4 years!), giving bedbaths, and making beds. We also checked vital signs. I never dressed a wound or did any kind of treatment. I never even did a cateritization or even saw one done. I never charted in any way or even looked at my patient's charts. In classes, I remember learning about different diseases but not how to assess in any way. The doctor did the assessing, and we followed his orders exactly unless we thought it was really an error on his or her part. ( Most doctors were HIS! lol) I remember taking 12 credits of chemistry including organic and biochemistry, but not one pharmacology course or math course.

Because I didn't feel confident enough to work in a hospital, I got a job as a school nurse teacher. I did that for two years, and when they cancelled school nurse teachers, and the wages went WAY down, I was hired as an elementary school teacher, got a quick MA in education and did that from 1972-2002 when I retired. At that time, I decided that I wanted to go back to nursing. I renewed my license and took a refresher course at a local college. WOW-was I in for a shock! In 6 weeks, I was taught to assess my patients, work with IV's as far as setting them up and administering meds through them, use a stethoscope, do finger pricks(which I also had never done), take care of patients with respirators, chart everything etc. etc. The first day, I cried and told my instructor I had no idea what to do and she would have to help me or I would have to quit. She did help me, and considering I did a very good job, and if the program had continued for another year, I may have been able to work as a nurse. I was just getting the idea when the program ended. I was not ready for it to end. I was just getting to feel a little competent. I did get a good recommendation .

I was offered a night job at the hospital where I did my clinicals for the refresher class. I turned it down. i still do not feel competent enough to work with people's lives.

I am now thinking of taking an accelerated nursing course for college graduates where I would retake all the nursing courses and hopefully they would accept all of my other college credis in the arts and sciences. Do you guys think I am crazy to do this???

-hope I am not too far off the topic but as a nursing student of the 60's, I need some advice from you. Thanks loads.

Krisssy_