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Aims and Objectives: To examine the surgical nurse's role in preventing wound sepsis (infection) and how this was portrayed in nursing literature in the pre-antibiotic period, 1895-1935., Background: While the history of infection control in general has been researched for the mid-20th century, more detailed research is needed of the pre-antibiotic period, specifically of the surgical nurse's role in preventing wound sepsis. Closer examination is also warranted of the way the nurse's role was perceived in specific practice areas, such as surgeons' views of the surgical nurse's role., Design: Historical research., Methods: Analysis of historical British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand nursing journals and British and Australian surgical nursing textbooks., Results: Between 1895-1935 skilled surgical nurses were valued as 'supporters' of the surgeon's heroic efforts, acting as diligent 'scrubbers' and vigilant 'sentries' to guard patients from microbial attack, yet tended to be blamed as 'saboteurs' and 'slovens' when wound sepsis occurred. The most noticeable changes in knowledge and practice related to greater use of sterilised dressing materials, less reliance on unnecessarily strong antiseptics, and less intensive methods in preparing surgical materials., Conclusions: Although the literature related the nurse's role to the surgeon rather than the patient, interpreting it merely as a subservient relationship would ignore the more complex portrayals evident in the literature. Surgeons looked for support rather than subservience, and a conscientious approach rather than obedience., Relevance to Clinical Practice: This historical research shows nurses both the enduring nature of aspects of clinical knowledge and practice as well as the slow process of change in others. It reminds nurses of the danger of infection, the constant vigilance required and the measures needed when practising without antibiotics.

This research describes nurses' experiences in administering "the water cure," hot or cold wet sheet packs, and continuous tub baths in state mental hospitals during the early twentieth century. Student and graduate nurses were required to demonstrate competence in hydrotherapy treatments used to calm agitated or manic patients in the era before neuroleptics. The nurses interviewed for this study indicated that, although labor intensive, hydrotherapy worked, at least temporarily. Although no longer used in state hospitals, hydrotherapy is regaining popularity with the general public and may serve as an adjunct to pharmacological treatments to calm hospitalized patients in the future.

Occupational health has been considered a subset of public health nursing for years. The first industrial or occupational health nurses were employed by large companies in the 1890s but the role evolved quickly in the early 20(th) century. By mid-century, many large companies employed a physician and nurse(s) to provide examinations, screenings, episodic care, and trauma intervention for workers. Occupational health nurses faced different problems than community-based public health nurses in generalized nursing service. The intersection of public health and employee health was apparent, though, because large industries often constituted the main workplace for a smaller community and sickness could spread throughout a town if the occupational health nurse was not well-prepared in principles of infection control and health promotion. Excerpts from this July 1949 article about building relationship between public health and industrial nurses illustrate the benefits hoped for when they were formally connected to one another through cross-training and in-service education. The author, Margaret Schwem, was a supervisor at the Rensselaer County Department of Health in Troy, New York. In the original article, Schwem included a list of reference materials for those interested in public health and industrial nursing.

Aim: to investigate how and why Chinese midwife numbers are dwindling, and to help understand the role of midwives in society in general., Method: to critically examine Chinese midwifery in three stages: (1) historical literature overview; (2) identification and reinterpretation of Chinese midwifery and its development; (3) placing issues that have arisen within a sociological context (i.e. the modernisation of obstetric technologies and the meaning of modernity)., Findings: no books on the history of Chinese midwifery were found. History was classified into three stages: (1) before 1929, a period of an indigenous model; (2) 1929-1996, the highs and lows of the bio-medical model; (3) after 1996, the demise of Chinese midwives. The issues identified were the legitimacy and professionalisation of Chinese midwives, the meaning of modernity and the reasons for the decline of Chinese midwifery., Conclusion: no sufficient evidence-based research was conducted to support the recent changes made to Chinese midwifery. The modernisation of maternity care in China took place amid dramatic social and cultural changes within society. As a consequence, midwifery as a profession in China has been marginalised. The modernisation of maternity care has failed to deliver on personal choice, quality of service and professional diversity., Implications for Practice: evidence-based research and the state's responsibility are essential to ensure the quality of maternity care and to protect the interests of women. The state's responsibilities include legislation regarding the role of midwives, code of practice, professional standards, responsibility and accountability in order to make midwifery care a true choice for women.

The boundaries between medicine, religion, nursing and domestic service were fluid in mid-nineteenth-century England. The traditional religious understanding of illness conflicted with the newer understanding of anatomically based disease, the Anglican sisters were drawing a line between professional nursing and the traditional role of nurses as domestic servants who looked after sick people as one of their many duties, and doctors were looking for more knowledgeable nurses who could carry out their orders competently. This prosopographical study of the over 200 women who served as government nurses during the Crimean War 1854-56 describes the status of nursing and provides a picture of the religious and social structure of Britain in the 1850s. It also illustrates how religious, political and social factors affected the development of the new nursing. The Crimean War nurses can be divided into four major groups: volunteer secular ladies, Roman Catholic nuns, Anglican sisters and working-class hospital nurses. Of these four groups I conclude that it was the experienced working-class nurses who had the greatest influence on the organization of the new nursing.

There is little historical knowledge available about nurses' role in anaesthesia in Canada. It appears, from the few sources available, that nurses did administer anaesthesia in the early 20th century in Canada. The limited historiography reveals that nurses who worked in small rural hospitals across Canada were, due to the lack of physician specialty and coverage, involved in the administration of anaesthesia. To learn more about nurses' role in this area the authors explored the oral history collection from the British Columbia's History of Nursing group at the College of Registered Nurses of British Columbia Library. Several stories indicated that between 1917 and 1953 there were opportunities for Canadian nurses to administer anaesthesia. The oral histories identified that there was a need for the administration of anaesthesia, that nurses had the skill to provide it, and that flexibility in their nursing practice enabled them to fulfill this role. There was an increasing need for anaesthesia service that was not being filled by physicians. To further explore nurses' role the authors also examined nursing and medical journals from that time period. There is limited understanding of how this role ceased to exist in Canada while it became well established in the United States. Various legal cases from that time period, and the substantially different results between Canadian and America cases, provide some insight into the reasons why nurse anaesthetists were excluded from anaesthesia practice in Canada. As the Canadian healthcare environment continues to change, and the need for anaesthesia services increases, new questions have begun to arise about the potential for an advanced practice role in anaesthesia for Canadian nurses. The demand for anaesthesia services is increasing in-line with the aging Canadian population and the shortage of available services is most dramatic in small, rural hospitals. This article provides important historical background on the development of the role of nurse anaesthetists in Canada.

Nurses have a long tradition of storytelling. Nurses in the New Zealand government's Backblocks Nursing Service, established in 1909 for settlers in remote rural areas, related narratives of personal experience in articles, conference papers and letters to their chief nurse that were published in the country's nursing journal. Analysis of the 16 stories published between 1910 and 1915 revealed 14 had a common storyline and structure. Structural elements included a call, arduous journey, arrival and reconnaissance, trial (difficult case or circumstance), resolution and homily. Using a literary folkloristics approach, this article argues that repetition of the story by nurses in different regions traditionalised it as a professional folktale, 'The nurse's odyssey'. It enabled nurses to debrief from difficult cases and write-into-being this new role and practice. Striking differences in the practice setting ensured the story's reportability, while clinical details connected writer and readers through a common professional aesthetic context and strengthened the story's credibility. For the chief nurse who was also a journal editor, publishing the stories allowed her to potentially attract nurses to the service while alerting them to its harsh realities, and show policy-makers the profession's value in meeting new health service needs.

For nurses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cleanliness was often seen as a virtue next to godliness. For missionary nurses, this analogy took on multiple meanings. This study focuses on discourses of cleanliness at one site of missionary nursing in the early twentieth century: the Rehoboth Mission and its hospital, which provided health-care to the Navajo in the southwestern USA from 1903 to 1965. Data sources included denominational publications, institutional records, correspondence, questionnaires and interviews of the Dutch-American missionary nurses who practiced at the Rehoboth Mission. Discourse analysis was conducted on references to cleanliness, hygiene and sanitation in these texts. Secondary discourses of embodiment in daily practice, initiation and assimilation, caring, ignorance, environmental factors and gendered work were identified and analyzed. The study interrogates the whiteness of the nurses' dominant culture and sheds light on nurses' relationships with normative discursive frames that reflect and perpetuate inequalities, discredit non-dominant practices, and leave little room for competing discourses. It also illustrates a blurring of religion and health-care, and the need for a reflective and informed stance as a basis for cultural competence.

Aim: The aim of this study is to explore the history of family-centered care (FCC)., Background: FCC was developed after Word War II, when nursing, then deeply paternalistic, had become asynchronous with changing social expectations for the care of hospitalized children., Methods: This is a historical review of literature reflecting development of pediatric models of care using publications of classic theorists and others., Results: Development of FCC resulted from work by U.S. and UK researchers, theorists, and advocates. Their research was right for its time, and its acceptance was the result of social readiness for change resulting from people's experience of Word War II., Conclusion: Word War II brought about changes enabling emergence of lobby groups concerned with children in hospital, awakening of pediatric health professionals to family-oriented practice, and development of models of care that allowed widescale adoption of FCC.

An analysis of published literature, interviews with early transplant nurses, and other primary source materials shows how evolving medical treatments for rejection, nurses' ability to learn on the job, and their commitment to patients influenced the development of kidney transplantation as a specialized area of practice. The work of these nurses work is discussed in the context of unfolding nursing specialization at the middle of the twentieth century.

The nursing profession has a long history of helping to advance health care. This column describes contributions of the first nurses associated with a major medical center in the Midwest and their vision to build and staff a hospital to support the medical practice of a local physician and his two sons. The story comes to life as a readers' theater featured in department-wide orientation to the Department of Nursing.

Findings of this study of the role and functions of nurses working with renal dialysis and transplant teams between 1915 and 1970 suggest that many of the activities of dialysis and transplant nurses were assistive and technical in nature. However, further analysis of the characteristics of direct nursing care demonstrates that early nephrology nurses incorporated family support, interpersonal communication, and patient teaching as essential components in order to assist patients and their families in coping with the stresses of receiving these new experimental treatments.

This paper is a personal journey through nurse training and perioperative practice. Nurse education is also explored alongside some of the social, academic and political changes that have influenced healthcare in the United Kingdom between 1966 and 2008. The views expressed are those of the author only, and the anecdotal descriptions are anonymous.

This paper aims to explore the evolution of psychiatric nursing from the delayed organization of an asylum mental health system in Greece to the present. The care and custody of mental health patients which was in the hands of police at the first asylum passed to the hands of uneducated staff and gradually to the hands of qualified nurses. Severe overcrowding along with limited resources and low staff numbers resulted in the poor quality of living conditions. In this context, psychiatric nursing took its first steps in Greece, without realizing the inherent conflict in its dual role, that of care and social control. Counter to the handed-down cliché about psychiatric hospitals, nurses frequently put great effort into improving the living conditions of patients. However, the regulations of the institutions emphasizing the custodial role of nursing together with other structural factors of the psychiatric system impeded nurses' attempts to improve institutional care considerably. Nowadays, psychiatric hospitals are shrinking at a rapid pace, leaving behind them--as heritage for the psychiatric nurses who try to define their new role in community--the pioneers of psychiatric nursing's courage, ethos and respect for the psychiatric client.

The purpose of this article is to describe a method used to historicize the lived experience of nurse caring by the culture of white Northern women during the American Civil War. Primary sources included unpublished and published Civil War letters, journals, diaries, memoirs, reminiscences, narratives, and records from 1861 through 1911. The phenomenological description was created using van Manen's approach for hermeneutic phenomenology and Drew's method for examining the researcher's preunderstanding of a phenomenon. The phenomenological description was historicized using Scott's concept of historicizing and Leininger's Sunrise Model as a framework. The method used to historicize the lived experience of American Civil War nurse caring provides a foundation for examining American nurse caring in other time periods in order to reveal the phenomenon of nurse caring during these periods as well as the cultural and social forces that have shaped American Nursing.

I recently used The English Patient (both the novel and the movie) with an undergraduate health science class to explore the unique character of the patient-provider relationship. Through the interactions of a young Canadian nurse and her "English" patient, author Michael Ondaatje presents an interesting view of the nurse-patient relationship. In this essay, I use quotations from the novel to demonstrate that Ondaatje sees the nurse-patient relationship as somber, sensual, and compassionate. The theme is particularly relevant to nursing students and those who teach them.

At first involved in private practice the majority of midwives became hospital practitioners as great changes of social behaviour occurred after 1945. After the creation of the Order of midwives they were directly subordinated to the medical profession. Their abilities were redefined in 1983; in 1995 they found again a part of autonomy and were admitted in the teaching of the Hospitals of the Universities.

The purpose of this article is to explore concepts of thinking and learning in a Heideggerian sense. It inquires into a theoretical and practical conceptualization, explores possibilities for participation in thinking and learning in the nursing experience, and offers a philosophy of learning appropriate to the nursing experience.

This column focuses on ideas concerning leaders and leadership. The author proposes that leadership is about showing up and participating with others in doing something. "Mandela: His 8 Lessons of Leadership" by Richard Stengel is explored in light of selected philosophical writings, literature on nursing leadership, and nurse theorist Rosemarie Rizzo Parse's humanbecoming leading-following model. Teaching-learning questions are then posed to stimulate further reflection on the lessons of leadership.

Childbirth was an almost secret process. In 1846 the mother or the husband of the parturient was admitted and on the other hand the nurses could follow the labour with the new positions. Interference of the sense of modesty for the patients as well as for the doctors greatly changed their relationship during the nineteenth century. Some situations are presented.

Background: Over a period of more than 50 years, there have been huge changes in nursing education in Norway owing to large numbers of political and other official resolutions., Aim: To evaluate how these decisions have had influence upon the role of the nurse teacher., Methods: The contents of political documents, government-sponsored curricula and articles in The Norwegian Nurse Organization's journal Sykepleien were analysed., Findings: The main findings are structured into two periods. During the period from 1950 to 1979, nurse education was strongly bound by official detailed terms for the curriculum, and the role of the teacher was ruled by these regulations. In the next period, from 1980 to the present, the situation in nursing education changed. From now on, the teachers had to develop the curricula based on more general plans and regulations. During these years, the numbers of students increased dramatically, and there also was tremendous pressure on nurse teachers to undertake further qualifications and to do scientific work. At the same time, the teachers had to fulfil their duties in teaching and supervising the students, and support their supervisors in clinical practice., Conclusion: The role of the nurse teachers in Norway has, in many ways, been driven by many different interests and they are still struggling to meet the different demands made upon them.

School nursing is ripe for development and could well be an interesting specialist area to work in for the innovative nurse, given some of the problems nowadays. For example, child abuse, the increasing problem of children with obesity and poor diet, alcohol abuse, smoking and sexual health issues. Although the nature of some of the health problems has changed there are some commonalities with what was happening 100 years ago in Britain at the time.

One hundred years ago the role of the nurse was not always clear and there were several types of nurses around using various titles. Some would be well trained and knowledgeable, others would barely have received any form of training and often worked from the experience they received working on the job. This often led, as it still does today, to confusion over what was the fundamental role of a nurse.

This work posits how medical history might be conceptualized if nurses and nursing history was used as the analytical lens. Nursing is seen not as a separate part or subsection of medical history, but rather one that is deeply embedded in the relationships and social order of clinical practice. Nursing is an analytical category in and of itself. By approaching nursing as such a category, we enlarge "new notions of historical significance" to encompass personal, political, public, and private activities that constitute medical experiences.

From the beginning of modern nursing, data from standardized patient records were seen as a potentially powerful resource for assessing and improving the quality of care. As nursing informatics began to evolve in the second half of the 20th century, the lack of standards for language and data limited the functionality and usefulness of early applications. In response, nurses developed standardized languages, but until the turn of the century, neither they nor anyone else understood the attributes required to achieve computability and semantic interoperability. Collaboration across disciplines and national boundaries has led to the development of standards that meet these requirements, opening the way for powerful information tools. Many challenges remain, however. Realizing the potential of nurses to transform and improve health care and outcomes through informatics will require fundamental changes in individuals, organizations, and systems. Nurses are developing and applying informatics methods and tools to discover knowledge and improve health from the molecular to the global level and are seeking the collective wisdom of interdisciplinary and interorganizational collaboration to effect the necessary changes. NOTE: Although this article focuses on nursing informatics in the United States, nurses around the world have made substantial contributions to the field. This article alludes to a few of those advances, but a comprehensive description is beyond the scope of the present work.

The author was afforded opportunity during her doctoral studies to compile and reflect upon the scholarly work of nurse researcher, Dr Janice Morse. Morse's refinement and development of patient-centred, empirically based concepts and theories, and her mastery of a diverse research repertoire, are an indisputable contribution to nursing knowledge. The author delineates four ways by which Morse's work contributes to nursing's disciplinary body of knowledge: (i) the consistent focus on the nurse-patient domain; (ii) the multiplicity of knowledge forms; (iii) the promotion of paradigm integration and methodological pluralism; and (iv) the predominance of prescriptive theories. Additionally, conjecture is put forth regarding the philosophical assumptions underpinning Morse's work. Morse serves as an excellent role model for nurse researchers who strive to ensure that nursing theories are amenable to clinical application, to research investigation and to utilization as a pedagogical tool.

Background: During the Cold War that followed World War II, the nursing profession was challenged to prepare for mass disasters. Army Nurse Corps officer Harriet H. Werley made significant contributions to the field of nursing in mass disaster preparation, education, and research during the 1950s., Objectives: To analyze nurses' involvement in research and mass disaster preparations during the Cold War era and to describe the role of Harriet H. Werley and the Army Nurse Corps., Methods: The research was conducted using a historical research method. Primary sources included the H. H. Werley Papers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Secondary sources were related to the Army Nurses Corps, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, the Cold War, and nuclear testing., Results and Discussion: In the Army Medical Services Department of Atomic Casualties Studies, Werley participated in disaster response classes, nuclear attack simulations, and biomedical research. These efforts fueled Werley's vision for nursing research and interdisciplinary collaboration, resulting in the Army's first department of nursing research. Her actions influenced the nursing community to consider its professional responsibility as a key provider in disaster management and partner in interdisciplinary research. Today, 50 years later, the nursing profession again faces demands and challenges regarding disaster management preparation.

During World War II, psychiatric nurses learned valuable lessons on how to deal with the traumas of war. Using psychohistorical inquiry, this historian examined primary and secondary sources, beyond the facts and dates associated with historical events, to understand why and how psychiatric nurse pioneers developed therapeutic techniques to address the psychosocial and physical needs of combatants. Not only is the story told about the hardships endured as nurses ministered to soldiers, but their attitudes, beliefs, and emotions, that is, how they felt and what they thought about their circumstances, are explored. In this study the lived experiences of two psychiatric nurses, Votta and Peplau, are contrasted to explicate how knowledge development improved care and how this knowledge had an impact on the home front in nursing practice and education, as well as in mental institutions and society, long after the war was won.