Men Nurses

Abstract

T HE trained nurse is now so closely identified with all phases of health work, that to learn that nursing as a profession in this country is a .development occurring within a lifetime comes as a surprise. As a development, the increase in the number of training schools is without parallel. From one school with six pupils, in 1873, to approximately 1,800 schools with 84,000 pupils sixty years later is just beyond one's ability to comprehend. Surprising as all of this may be, the fact that leading doctors of the day, not only opposed the establishment of that first school, but were aggressively antagonistic to it, when viewed in the light of today, beggars belief. What is it? What kind of a thing is a training school for nurses? were questions propounded by some of those learned men to the group of philanthropic women interested in its founding. In a modest little volume Recollections of a Happy Life, Mrs. Elizabeth C. Hobson, secretary of the woman's board, in a chapter devoted to the founding of the Bellevue Training School for Nurses, gives a word picture of the early conferences between the two boards that is more illuminating than any chapter I have yet found in any book on the history of nursing. This happened in 1873. The schools at Boston and New Haven were opened in the same years, others following soon after. Founded, as these schools were, by the concerted action of public-spirited women and not only opposed in the effort but personally affronted by men, it is natural that nursing at its inception should have so entirely revolved about young women-and it is not at all surprising that it should not have occurred to any one that mere man was endowed with thequalities that fitted him either for training or the bedside care of the sick. It required fifteen years of time and remained for that practical philanthropist, Mr. D. Ogden Mills, to make the discovery. In July, 1888, his generosity made possible the establishment of the Mills School for Men Nurses at Bellevue Hospital. He said, in his letter of presentation, In the great development of means for caring for the helpless sick, which marks the present century, no want has been more felt than that for trained nurses. Medical science has made immense advances. While the schools furnished physicians, and the humane spirit of the age built and endowed hospitals, it was still hard to supply the skilled care which often does more than medicine for the sufferer. The training school for female nurses was a great gain. Personal observation of the good it has done has led me to think that an equal service might be rendered by an institution for the training of male nurses. The humane work of physicians could thus be efficiently supplemented, the suffering of the sick under their care alleviated, while the community would gladly employ all the male nurses the hospitals could spare, and so enable the students thus trained to make the vocation of nursing their life work.