NURSING HISTORY

Nursing History

Nursing History

The logic, art and work of nursing, and the nurse 'herself', feel and have felt almost all lives wherever they are lived. Muslim nurses, mostly women, are more various than their colleagues who practice medicine. (El-Haddad, 2006) It would appear that the nursing history is exceptionally placed to add to the typical history of health care and women. Yet nurses and their roles in Arab countries have paying attention from experts of medicine and health and, until very recently, from feminist scholars. Nurses hardly ever appear in accounts of pioneering medicine and were awarded slight space in the histories of Muslim culture.

The written history of 'modern' nursing in the English-speaking world began to be constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century; it rapidly took on the guise of a professional project designed to valorize and justify an emergent profession for respectable women of the time. For many years the creation of a grand narrative of the history of nursing was something engaged with and read almost exclusively by nurses. This position changed only slowly, and in UAE the publication by Ahmed in 1960 of A History of the Muslim Nursing marked a new phenomenon, the direction of serious attention to the history of nursing by non-nurses.

However, El-Haddad, interested in health care policy, made it clear in the introduction to his book that he proposed to write a political history of nursing; he saw himself as unfitted to write a history of nursing techniques or of nursing as an activity or skill. (El-Haddad, 2006) Since 1960, the history of nursing has continued along two tracks. A clear thread of work that valorizes the profession has continued; but a critical historiography emerged in the later twentieth century that is beginning to challenge for a place in the mainstream of social, gender and medical history.

The history of nursing has been dominated, overshadowed and at times swamped by the iconic figure of Rufaida Al-Asalmiya. (Rafat Jan, 2007) Rufaida Al-Asalmiya was an immensely complex, talented and long-lived woman whose contributions in early Muslim culture was enormous. Innumerable accounts of her life have been published, and Rufaida Al-Asalmiya continues to attract Arabic Scholars for both a scholarly and an admired readership.

One device that has supported the legend of Rufaida Al-Asalmiya was the notion of a disreputable nurse of a former era. The figure that embodied this role was fictional, but none the less powerful and influential. The endurance and widespread acceptance of the image of Rufaida Al-Asalmiya as a representative nurse challenges the historian to re-examine the issues thrown up by such a one-dimensional account of a large group of Muslim women. Another consequence of the focus on Rufaida Al-Asalmiya has been the virtual exclusion of consideration of nursing prior to the nineteenth century. This imbalance is beginning to be acknowledged and addressed in the work of Carole Rawcliffe and others.

Rufaidah bint Sa'ad, is known as the first Muslim nurse. ...