Hospitals and Modern Nursing

Hospitals

Changes from 1800-1900

Number:

-1800: 2 in America, 4,000 beds in UK
-1873 (US): 173 including mental (50,000 beds)
-1901 (England & Wales) 28,000 beds
-1909 (US): 4,359 hospitals (421,065 beds)

Specialty,followed specialization of medical practice:

-Surgery
-Dentistry (18c France)
-Pediatrics (1802 children's hospital in Paris)
-Obstetrics (competition with midwives)
-Ear (1816 hospital)
-Ophthalmology (1812 1st clinic in Vienna)
-Orthopedics (followed WWI)
-Venereal disease
-cancer

Nature of hospitals
Underlying changes

diagnostics
surgery
integrated with medical training
nursing

Nursing

"The most important single element in reshaping the day-to-day texture of hospital life was the professionalization of nursing." (Rosenberg, 1987)

Traditional source of nurses:

Religious

Lay, lower-class, mid-wife assistants
-Sairy Gamp, nurse and midwife
from Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)

1860 -> Reforms

Religious:
-Catholic St. Vincent de Paul (18c) Daughters of Charity
-Protestant: Deaconess, Fliedners, Kaiserhof Germany 1840s

Lay reformers:

Dix, Barton

Nightingale

Crimea
St. Thomas’s Nursing School (1860)
Sister schools

Sweden (1867)
Australia (1867
U.S. (1873)
Canada (1874)
Denmark (1897)

Broader influence:

Industrialization
War
Women's movement
Medicine/ hospital care

Features of nursing reform

Pressure groups (women and others)

Training:
-medical and non-medical
-subordination to doctors

Government regulation and support