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Source 1
During the Reformation, Catholic institutions were
abolished by the newly formed Protestants. What had been good hospitals for the
times, were replaced by Work Houses and Alms Houses for the poor. Some
hospitals did replace the Catholic ones but without the organization and
management of the Church, the conditions were abysmal.
The care in the new institutions was provided by
prisoners, pardoned criminals, alcoholics and aged prostitutes, no longer young
enough to ply their trade. The "nurses" were best characterised by
Charles Dickens's portrayal of Sairey Gamp. Sairey was an elderly prositute
working as a "nurse" who ate her patient's food and drank the
family's booze. She was hired to care for patients whose relatives could afford
her sparse wage. Essentially her work consisted of sitting with the patient and
doing as little as possible. It was a matter of survival of the nurses not the
patients.
"Perspectives on nursing" Donna Forrest 1999
Source 2
Florence
decided that she must train to be a nurse. Her family was horrified. In her
day, nursing was done mostly by disabled army veterans or by women with no
other means of support. It was common for nurses of either sex to be drunk on
the job most of the time, and they had no training at all. It was common
practice never to wash or change the sheets on a bed, not even when a patient
died and his bed was given to a new patient. Florence was told to go to
Kaiserswerth, Germany, to learn and train with the Lutheran order of
Deaconesses who were running a hospital there. Back in England again, she used
the influence of Sidney Herbert, a family friend and Member of Parliament, to
be appointed supervisor of a sanatorium in London. Under her able guidance, it
turned from a chamber of horrors into a model hospital. The innovations
introduced by Miss Nightingale were, for their day, little short of
revolutionary. She demanded, and got, a system of dumb-waiters that enabled
food to be sent directly to every floor, so that nurses
did not exhaust
themselves carrying trays up numerous flights of stairs. She also invented and
had installed a system of call bells by which a patient could ring from his bed
and the bell would sound in the corridor, with a valve attached to the bell
which opened when the bell rang, and remained open so that the nurse could see
who had rung. "Without a system of this kind," she wrote, "a
nurse is converted to a pair of legs."
"Florence
Nightingale, nurse, renewer of society" James Kiefer 2000
Source 3
"They are
sexually, constitutionally and mentally unfitted for the hard and unending
work, and for the heavy responsibilities of general medical and surgical
practice. Women might become midwives, but in an inferior position of
responsibility as a rule. I know of no great discovery changing the boundaries
of scientific knowledge that owes its existence to a woman. What right have
woman to claim mental equality to men?"
An extract from
an article in "The Lancet" 1870
Source 4
" She was a
wonderful woman.... all the men swore by her, and in case of any malady , would
seek her advise and use her herbal medicines, in preference to reporting
themselves to their own doctors. That she did effect some cure is beyond
doubt, and her never failing presence amongst the wounded after a battle and assisting
them made her beloved buy the rank and file of the whole army'
A soldier at Scutari decribes the work of the
Black nurse Mary Seacole
Source 5
During the 19th century the movement for reform in
nursing was led by Florence Nightingale, a woman of intellectual
and moral power. Family contacts with humanitarian leaders and an education
that included training in science, mathematics, and political economy were her
preparation. She critically studied nursing as it was practiced in several
countries, formulated her ideas, and wrote extensively.
In 1854 Florence Nightingale was asked by the
British secretary of state at war to go to Scutari in Turkey, where absence of
sewers and of laundering facilities, lack of supplies, poor food, disorganized
medical service, and absence of nursing led to a death rate of more than 50
percent among wounded soldiers. Her work and that of the nurses whom she recruited
brought sufficient improvement to lower the death rate to 2.2 percent. A gift
of £45,000 was raised by popular subscription, and Florence Nightingale used it
to establish schools of nursing at St. Thomas's Hospital in London and
elsewhere.
Florence Nightingale believed nursing to be
suitable as an independent career for capable, trained women, that nursing
services should be administered by those with special preparation, and that
relationships between physicians and nurses should be professional. She
maintained that schools of nursing should be administered by nurses with
physicians as part of the hospital labour force. She believed that there was a
substantial body of knowledge and skills to be learned in nursing. Nurses were
to be prepared for hospital nursing and care of the sick at home, and they were
to teach good health practices to patients and families.
By the end of the 19th century, the idea that a
nurse needed to be educated and trained had spread to much of the Western
world. In England, Scandinavia, America, and much of the British Empire,
schools of nursing were generally based on training hospitals, and more nurses
had become independent of religious institutions
Encyclopeadia Brittannica CD Rom 1999
Source 6
You are expected to become skilful:
1. In the dressing of blisters, sores and wounds and applying
poultices and minor dressings
2. In the application of leeches, externally and internally
3. In the management of helpless patients, i.e. moving,
changing, cleanliness, preventing and dressing bed sores
4. You are required to attend at operations
5. To be competent to cook gruel, arrowfoot, egg flip puddings
and drinks for the sick
Instructions to new nurses at Florence
Nightingale's school for nurses 1862
Questions
Using the sources and your own knowledge answer
the following questions. Print out the questions and sources and give yourself
35 minutes in exam conditions. Come back on line to mark your work against our
mark scheme (link)
1. What does source 1 tell us about nursing before the late 19th
century? (6 marks)
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2. Study sources 3 and 4. Which would be the most useful to an
historian studying the history of nursing? (6 marks)
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Come back on line once you have
answered the questions. Time allowed 40 minutes!