I liked seeing how the nurse and the nursing profession has evolved from the depicted “Sarah Gamps”, the caricature of the callous domiciliary nurse created by the novelist Charles Dickens, to the nurse we know today. I believe that any reader will be struck by the similarities of events and practices that have gone on in the past, and how we seem destined to repeat events in later years (even down to detailing how matron was balancing the budget by closing beds and laying off nurses). And it makes the connection between this being a female vocation, working class, not socially mobile employment, and the problems with recruitment and retention of nurses in the early nineteenth century (a situation that I am sure we could all relate to today). It also demonstrates how the pre-industrial work ethic of the old hospital nurses could not meet the requirements of the new medicine. This book hopes to demonstrate through the use of historical literature and accounts that the real cause of nursing reform was the development of the new scientific medicine. Rather than being the beginning of nursing reform, Nightingale nursing was the culmination of these two earlier reforms. This book discusses two major earlier reforms in nursing: a doctor-driven reform, which came to be called the ‘ward system’, and the reforms of the Anglican Sisters, known as the ‘central system’ of nursing. Nursing Before Nightingale describes itself as a study of the transformation of nursing in England from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the emergence of the Nightingale nurse as the standard model in the 1890s. school nurse, Norfolk Community Health and Care (NCH+C) What was it like? Reviewer: Paul Watson RN, BA(Hons), SCPHN, PSHE, PGCE. Title: Nursing before Nightingale, 1815-1899 (The History of Medicine in Context)Īuthors: Carol Helmstadter, Judith Godden
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