Our Responsibility as Nurses to Our Profession

Abstract

IN thinking about the subject of this paper, I was impelled to reframe the title that we might think together in the first rather than in the third person. "Our Responsibility as Nurses to our Profession" makes us partners in whatever we may enjoy of success or whatever we may have to face in the light of failure. You and I are "the nurses" to which we are wont to refer, and it is we who must share the joys, shoulder the burdens, and assume the responsibilities which are thrust upon ourselves and our professional colleagues. We no longer are a little band of sisters following Saint Vincent de Paul, but a great army of professional women scattered throughout the world, still holding sacredly to the ideals of service which motivated the works of mercy and love of the earliest of our leaders. We are members of one vast sisterhood united by tangible bonds of human service woven in and out of every phase of life; a great body of professional women now bound together by the broad ultimate objectives of our nursing associations. When we are assembled at one of our biennial conventions, we are conscious of a oneness of spirit; we are at home with each other for the reason that we are a family and feel a sisterly relationship. Our experiences, though different in many respects, have been similar, and we understand the language of life in joy, in sorrow, and even in death. As nurses we live with human beings in life's varied experiences and share with them the trials and vicissitudes of life, with their resulting disciplines. Nursing is intrinsically interpreted through the story of the Good Samaritan and through the teachings of Him who charged His disciples to minister unto all those who called upon them for help. In this age of confusion, in the midst of scattered and irresponsible thinking, we seem not to remember that the profession of nursing is different from that of many other vocations, and that its problems, which are never static, cannot be solved by similar arbitrary and mechanical means. Consequently, nurses cannot endeavor to meet these problems according to a definite standardized pattern. Our responsibilities change as life changes with us. As we grow older we are prone to act in given situations in accord with familiar patterns of behavior, forgetting that to meet life's changes we must learn a series of new responses in place of those which have lost their value and often even their usefulness. It is never safe to assume that what has been must always continue to be. The youth of today is born into a world different from that of many of us who are attempting to mold their professional lives and dictate the pattern they are to follow. After groping and deep heart-searching we have found it wise to discard, one after another, certain of our cherished traditions because they cannot be accepted by our colleagues of