THE EFFECT OF WAR ON NURSING

The Effect of War on Nursing

The Effect of War on Nursing

In the 19th century the Industrial Revolution saw the rise of a prosperous middle class of manufacturers who began to seek professional advancement for their children. Medicine attracted many applicants, all able to pay for hospital know-how, and doctors soon required to split up beds among themselves for teaching purposes. In the first half of the 19th century, hospitals in London and the large-scale provincial cities had so many medical students that there was no require of nurses, except as unskilled attendants. One result of this surge of medical training was that acute surgery and surgery supplied all the 'interesting' cases and 'good teaching material', and the chronic sick, the enfeebled aged, and the psychiatrically sick were not wanted in the voluntary hospitals.(Bigbee, 2003) This had far-reaching effects on the development of the nursing profession.

There were two important facts that made nursing women's work. First, nursing was always seen as part of domestic household work; secondly, there were 2.5 million women, mostly spinsters and widows, seeking means of support through work. Working-class women might wish to find paid work in factories, where, although badly paid and overworked, they contacted outside their homes, and learned the facts of industrial life. Middle-class women could be governesses, often employed only for their hold, or clerks employed a 60-hour week for 12 shillings. When, throughout the Crimean War (1854-56), Florence Nightingale showed that there was work that smart women could manage in hospital, so enthusiastic was the response that by the 1890s more women wanted to nurse than could be trained. Thus for nearly three-quarters of a century nursing in Britain was fashioned by a great pioneer and by the social trends of Victorian England. Nurses were to be women, and dedicated to their work; they were thus doubly vulnerable to financial exploitation, and remained so until the middle of the 20th century.(Komnenich, 2004)

 

WORLD WAR I

The Vassar Training Camp was evolved in response to the nursing shortage resulting from World War I. The Vassar Training Camp suggested a preparatory course in nursing from which students would then proceed into school of nursing. The Army School of Nursing was also established.(Sox, 2008) Mary Breckinridge worked with the American Committee of Devastated France in 1918 distributing food. Clothing and supplies to rural villages in France and taking care of sick children. In 1921, Breckinridge returned to the United States with plans to supply health care to the persons of rural America.(Komnenich, 2004) Breckinridge began one of the first midwifery training schools in the U.S. The general tendency of nursing of the late 1800's to the end of World War I was rapid expansion in the establishment of hospitals, with nursing schools reliant on them for support. Hospitals in turn counted on the schools to carry the head nursing load.(Sox, 2008)

During World War II women won advancement in many fields, while sharing the hardships of the battlefield and the prisoner-of-war ...