Nursing Knowledge
There is no doubt that nursing has a theoretical basis, regardless of it historical lack of professional recognition. Most nurses would agree that the theoretical beginning of nursing occurred during the reformative period when Florence Nightingale attempted to define what nursing is and what it is not, in an attempt to resolve its duplicity in the medical community and among the public. She furthered what has been referred to as the medical model of nursing theory, through a definitive work associated with defining the role of nurses and medicine in the curative processes of nature....the function of an organ becomes obstructed; medicine, as far as we know, assists nature to remove the obstruction, but does nothing more. Nurses could be actively involved in this process of 'putting the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him' if given appropriate training. This may also remove them from their subservient position to the physician. Nightingale stated that, 'if I have succeeded in any measure in . . . showing what true nursing is, and what it is not, my object will have been answered.'tm (Mckenna, 1997, p. 86) Historically speaking, nursing has been seen as a adjunct at times to medical intervention, and at ot
Dating back to the Civil War, women have served as military nurses and demonstrated that they had the physical stamina, emotional reserves, and commitment necessary to take on the difficult work of nursing under the harshest of conditions. Denied the dignity of a trade, and devoid of professional ethics, she could not rise above the degradation of her environment. 1)Resolutions to change the social and professional status of nurses may have begun in writing with Nightingale but are likely as old as the profession itself. Nevertheless, these women would not be thwarted any more than their sister nurses had been in 1861; they marched off into a new conflict and proved again that the services of female nurses were superior to the efforts of unmotivated enlisted men. With the onset of the Spanish-American War, however, women learned that some things remained constant despite their proven efforts. Discussions regarding the development of nursing theories to assist with this generation of knowledge and to assist with the definition and identification of the unique role and functions of nursing have taken place since the middle 1960s and early 1970s. According to another Nightingale expert the role of nursing has been defined variously and largely without the voice of the "profession" for as long as the nurse has been a needed part of the medical care of the individual. She was not an artisan who could obtain the help of an hereditary guild; there was no Hanseatic League for nurses. 3) The rather modern social rejection of medicine as a hero based representation of the allopathic life saving abilities of man applying science to the biological has also changed the manner in which nursing theory has evolved. her times the necessary aspects of any "servant" of the ill. Some individuals in nursing identify Florence Nightingale as the first nursing theorist. She was the first individual to define and describe nursing in her Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not.
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Acceptance Essays
