The sweeping history of nursing proves that if there is a human tendency to tear apart, to hurt and destroy, there is also a human instinct to mend, to organize skilled care, to reach out to each other. The idea of Nightingale, the lady with the lamp, as the prototypical nurse-this mythic origin story-has served to further white supremacy in nursing and to strip nursing history of its truer, broader kaleidoscopic power. Maybe that radicalness is why that history has been so elided, even as nursing historians have sought to bring it forward.
The real history of nursing is utterly radical in its vastness-and in what it says about the care we owe each other. She did become famous for advocating for nursing as a trained profession, but as she did so, she shrank nursing into a restrictive, exclusionary Victorian corset, constructing a version of nursing that conformed to rigid social mores, one divided by class, race, and gender-a reimagining of nursing palatable to British colonialism. (Of course, 2020 turned out to be the year of the nurse in ways no one anticipated.)īut, like most lone-hero narratives, this one is not entirely true: For one thing, Nightingale herself trained with a group of German deaconess nurses, something she could hardly have done if she invented nursing. Her legacy pervades both the general public’s understanding of nursing and nursing itself: May is National Nurses Month because Nightingale’s birthday is May 12th, and the World Health Organization dubbed 2020 the Year of the Nurse and Midwife to mark Nightingale’s 200th birthday. Just about every mainstream source, from the History Channel to Wikipedia, cites Nightingale, an upper-class lady of Victorian England, as the founder of modern nursing. If you think that Florence Nightingale invented nursing, you’re not alone. Dock, RN, and Mary Adelaide Nutting, RN, A History of Nursing, 1907 “No matter whether this treatment is carried out by sorcerers, priests, doctors, or old women, we find examples of the historic ancestry of modern nursing and the earliest forms of the art.”
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