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doi: 10.1891/1062-8061.17.47pmid: 20067081
<p>This article examines the extent to which the Instructive District Nursing Association (IDNA) of Boston was influenced by the English system of district nursing. The schemes had the same aims and motivation, but the differences in their organizational structures, in particular the lack of specialist training and professional supervision of the Boston nurses, affected the IDNA’s work with its poor, mainly immigrant patients. It is clear that much was achieved, but it is also apparent that problems increased as the work expanded. Attempts to solve these difficulties can be traced through the introduction of a nurse supervisor, establishment of a training school, and eventual radical reorganization. The IDNA also had a leading role in the expansion of the visiting nurse movement throughout the United States. I discuss attempts to establish national standards, particularly through the formation of the National Organization for Public Health Nursing (NOPHN). With the disparate arrangements in the U.S. health care system, the NOPHN was unable to reach a workable consensus and failed to produce a comprehensive and cohesive national system similar to that which had been established in England.</p>
doi: 10.1891/1062-8061.17.80pmid: 20067082
<p>A major controversy in French medicine at the turn of the 20th century was how to improve the training and education of hospital nurses. In 1899 the new government agency responsible for health and social services, the Conseil Supérieur de l’Assistance, encouraged setting up new nursing schools and imposing a curriculum to be followed by all. The Conseil discussion concerning these steps was very heated. Some councilors demanded the dismissal of all the religious nursing orders as a first step toward improving nursing services. Others favored efforts to educate all the nurses possible, be they religious or lay, leaving it to the municipalities to decide on the internal organization of their hospitals. To examine the issues faced by both choices, the article analyzes two cases of hospitals that went on to adopt each of the different orientations discussed: Le Havre, which set up a nursing school and kept its nuns, and Valence, which sent off its religious congregation and tried to set up a nursing school.</p>
doi: 10.1891/1062-8061.17.101pmid: 20067083
<p>The nursing work of the First World War is usually associated with the trench warfare of the Western Front. Nurses were based within fairly permanent casualty clearing stations and field hospitals, and patients were moved “down the line” to base hospitals, and then to convalescent hospitals “at home.” The nurses and volunteers who worked on the Eastern Front and offered their services to the <italic>letuchka</italic> or “flying columns” of the Russian medical services had a very different experience. They worked with highly mobile units, following a rapidly moving “front line.” The diaries of three British (one Anglo-Russian) nurses who worked alongside Russian nursing sisterhoods in three different flying columns—Violetta Thurstan (<italic>Field Hospital and Flying Column</italic>), Florence Farmborough (<italic>With the Armies of the Tsar</italic>) and Mary Britnieva (<italic>One Woman’s Story</italic>)—stand as an important corpus of nursing writing. Written in a highly romantic style, they take up similar themes around their work on the Eastern Front as a heroic journey through a dreamlike landscape. Each nurse offers a portrayal of the Russian character as fine and noble. The most important themes deal with the <italic>romance</italic> of nursing itself, in which nursing work is portrayed as both character-testing and a highly spiritual pursuit.</p>
doi: 10.1891/1062-8061.17.129pmid: 20067084
<p>Until the mid-1940s, young Black women who wanted to train as nurses in Canada were prohibited from doing so. The first cohort of Black Canadian registered nurses integrated Canadian nursing schools beginning in the early 1950s. I argue that despite entering an occupation that defined itself around Victorian ideals of “true womanhood,” an archetype that excluded Black women, these nurses were able to negotiate and secure a place in the profession. This research not only contributes to Canadian nursing, it also situates Canada, with respect to scholarly discussions about the Black Diaspora.</p>
doi: 10.1891/1062-8061.17.153pmid: 20067085
<p>Nurse practitioner legislation varies among states, particularly in relation to practice without physician oversight, altering the legal environment within which nurse practitioners can use knowledge and skills to meet patient needs. Using New Hampshire as a case study, this historical analysis of nurse practitioners’ negotiations over time for independent practice, defined in state practice acts, illuminates the complex social and economic factors affecting nurses’ struggle to gain legal rights over their own professional practice without supervision and intervention from another profession. In New Hampshire, not only did organized medicine oppose nurses’ rights to practice, but pharmacists demanded the right to control all aspects of medication management, including who could prescribe and under what circumstances prescribing could occur. Shifting social and political terrain as well as changes in legislative and state professional board leadership affected the environment and negotiations of a small group of nurses who were ultimately successful in obtaining the right to define their own professional practice.</p>
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