Nurses and VADs

Abstract

Nursing, like teaching, had long been accepted by the public as a suitable role for women. But unlike headmistresses and teachers, in the early to mid-nineteenth century, nursing was undertaken largely by poor, uneducated women who could find no better employment. This was to change radically as nursing reforms demanded higher standards and better educated women. Reforms began when Florence Nightingale, (credited as the founder of the modern nursing profession), took a post as superintendent of the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London. In 1854, with the outbreak of the Crimean War, Nightingale was appointed to lead a relief mission to Scutari. Within weeks she had overturned the systems, putting army doctors to shame and reducing the death rate among the wounded from over 40 per cent to just over 2 per cent. She returned a national heroine. Money raised for the Nightingale Fund established the world’s first modern training school for nurses at London’s St. Thomas’s Hospital in 1860. By 1907 Nightingale nurses had revolutionised hospital care throughout the English-speaking world.¹