History of Nursing Flashcards
- Intuitive: instinctive or untaught; largely based on common sense based on effects of past experience, not based on scientific training or formal education
- Women as custodian or nurse in nomadic tribes
- Illness: evil invasion; voodoo or black magic
Intuitive Nursing
- White magic (healing power)
- Hypnosis, charms, dances, incantations, purgatives, massage, fire, water, herbs, and other vegetations and even animals to drive away illness
Shaman (witch doctor/medicine man)
Hole drilled in the skull via rock or stone without anesthesia
Trephination
- Roots of Western civilization
- Birthplace of Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism
Nursing in the Near East
- Metropolis of the near East
- King Hammurabi: ruler from 1945 B.C. to 1902 B.C.
Babylonia
- Practice of Medicine
- Fees
- Discouraged experimentation
- Specialty for diseases
- Right of patient to choose (charms, drugs, surgery) to cure diseases
- Excavated 1849
- No mention of Nursing
Code of Hammurabi
- Embalming
- Record of 250 diseases
- Still no mention of nursing
Egypt
❖ Belief in spirits and demons
❖ Prohibited dissection of human body
❖ Materia Medica (Pharmacology)
❖Prescribed methods of treating wounds, infections, and muscular afflictions
❖ No mention of nursing but presumed female as in-charge of nursing the
sick
China
❖ Men of medicine-built hospitals
❖ Practiced intuitive form of Asepsis
❖ Proficient in the practice of medicine and surgery
❖ The mention of nurses was in reference to the first lay brothers or the priest nurses, who, by virtue of their vocation, voluntarily took charge of taking care of the sick.
India
His writings (written 200 or 300 B.C.) is a list of functions and qualifications of the priest-nurses who were described as combination of pharmacists, masseurs, physical therapists and cooks.
SUSHURUTU/SUSRUTA
Contributed to the decline of medical practice when the religion itself fell in this era.
Buddhism
❖ Nursing was the task of untrained slave
❖ Women were considered inferior to men & were made to stay at the
background to do house chores and care for the sick.
Greece
Father of Medicine in Greek mythology
Aesculapius
- Could be traced in Greek mythology but developed into an official insignia (sign; symbol of identity of the medical profession today)
- Composed of the staff of travelers intertwined with 2 serpents (symbol of Aesculapius and his healing power); and wings of Hermes or Mercury located at the apex of the staff (symbol of speed; speed of healing).
Caduceus
- Born in Greece in 460 BC
- Given the title Father of Medicine due to his notable contributions
to medical practice (in reality, not in mythology). - Developed a philosophy of medicine and practice medical ethics
- Rejected the belief that the origin of disease could be found in the supernatural
- Did not entrust care of the sick to untrained lay persons but to medical students; so role of nurses wasn’t also mentioned
Hippocrates
❖ Illness was considered a sign of weakness
❖ Care of the sick was left to the slaves and Greek physicians, both being
considered inferior by the Roman society
❖ Some were however converted to Christianity and left their pleasure-seeking life; some of them took good care of the sick (i.e., Story of FABIOLA)
Rome
❖ Nursing care performed by people who were directed by more experienced nurses, the beginning of organized nursing
❖ On-the-job training performed without any formal education: attributed to the religious orders of the Christian church.
❖ Built hospitals were staffed by religious orders who dedicated their lives to the care of the patients
❖ Organized nursing was found in the military, secular and mendicant or begging orders
Apprentice Nursing
Were considered as “Holy Wars “during which the Christian soldiers fought to re-capture the Holy Land from the Moslems; military religious orders were founded in order to establish hospitals staffed with men who served as nurses for those who were wounded in the war.
The Crusades
Fought in the battlefield and after every fight would retire to nurse the wounded.
Knights of St. John of Jerusalem (Rhodes, Malta) & Teutonic Knights
Established their hospitals primarily for nursing of the lepers
Knight of Saint Lazarus
- Founded in 1348
- Established the Alexian Brothers Hospital School of Nursing in Chicago which was the largest school of nursing under religious auspices operated exclusively for men in the U.S.
- Closed in 1969
Alexian Brothers
Founded by queens, princesses, and other royal ladies some orders found before the Reformation.
a. Augustinians
b. PoorClares
c. Beguines
d. Benedictines
e. Ursulines
f. Tertiaries (lay people who were affiliates of the religious) of St. Francis and of St. Dominic
Religious Nursing Orders
• Where the Augustinian nurses nursed the patients
• Hospitals then were poorly ventilated, mattresses were
hard and cleaned only 3x a year, beds were shared by 2 or 3 patients, laundry was done by nurses, linens were sometimes washed in the nearby river
Hotel Dieu (Paris)