Requiem for AJN’s Place in the Profession

Abstract

The American Nurses Association's (ANA) recent decision (March 2006) to sever its official ties with the American Journal of Nursing (AJN) saddened me. ANA's previous decision (1996) to sell AJN to the Lippincott Company (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins) for $24,000,0001 horrified me. How much is a birthright worth? There are moments in history when the paths of events, phenomena, and people intersect in such a way as to provide a focus of singular intensity and interest. The 1893 World's Fair in Chicago was such a moment for nursing. As chairman of the Hospital and Medical section of the International Congress of Charities, Dr. John Shaw Billings appointed as chair of the nursing subsection his colleague at Johns Hopkins, Isabel A. Hampton, Superintendent of Nurses and Principal of the Training School for Nurses at Hopkins. In turn, Hampton carefully named the topics to be discussed, appointed the speakers, and arranged the programs for nursing's first professional meeting, and on a grand stage at that. 2 As Lavinia Dock, Hamptons assistant at Hopkins, described it later: In the programme [sic] of this section, of which the arrangement was to her a devoutly serious piece of work, may be found the seedlings of almost all the later lines of growth in the nursing profession in the United States. Nor was it accidentally so, but the result of most earnest thought and divination. Often as she planned to whom certain themes should be given, did she describe the whole possible future that might arise from the ideas she hoped to have brought out.3 Throughout the week, Hampton laid out her plans for the organization and advancement of nursing: I hope that in the course of time we will be able to evolve Alumnae Associations, an American Nurses' Association, and a Superintendent's Convention. . .4 And so it occurred. The superintendents held their first meeting that very week, calling themselves the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools (which, in 1952, became the National League for Nursing). The alumnae associations had numbered only six before the fair, but once started, the founding of training school alumnae associations moved rapidly.5 When the associations joined together in 1896 to form The Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada (incorporated in 1911 as the ANA), Isabel Hampton Robb was elected the first president. Starting a graduate course for nursing instructors (at Teachers College in 1901) and founding a journal to communicate information and events (The American Journal of Nursing m 1900) followed in rapid order. Five different journals for nurses had been published before 1901. The first, The Nightingale, 1886-1891, was edited by a Bellevue graduate who was also a physician. Starting in 1888, The Trained Nurse and Hospital Review (later renamed The Nursing World) appeared monthly for seventy years. Josephine Dolan, in Nursing in Society, described how, in 1889, it combined with the Journal of Practical Nursing and later absorbed, one at a time, The Nightingale, The Nurse, The Nursing World, and The Nursing Record.6 But the AJN was the first journal managed entirely by nurses. …