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In the U.S., the role of public health nurse began in Los Angeles in 1898, by 1924 there were 12,000 public health nurses, half of them in the 100 largest cities. Their average annual salary in larger cities was $1390. In addition, there were thousands of nurses employed by private agencies handling similar work. Public health nurses supervised health issues in the public and parochial schools, to prenatal and infant care, handled communicable diseases and tuberculosis and dealt with an aerial diseases.[65] During the Spanish-American War of 1898, medical conditions in the tropical war zone were dangerous, with yellow fever and malaria endemic. The United States government called for women to volunteer as nurses. Thousands did so, but few were professionally trained. Among the latter were 250 Catholic nurses, most of them from the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul.[66] Nursing schools Sporadic progress was made on several continents, where medical pioneers established formal nursing schools. But even as late as the 1870s, "women working in North American urban hospitals typically were untrained, working class, and accorded lowly status by both the medical profession they supported and society at large". Nursing had the same status in Great Britain and continental Europe before World War I.[67] Hospital nursing schools in the United States and Canada took the lead in applying Nightingale's model to their training programmers: standards of classroom and on-the-job training had risen sharply in the 1880s and 1890s, and along with them the expectation of decorous and professional conduct[67] In late the 1920s, the women's specialties in health care included 294,000 trained nurses, 150,000 untrained nurses, 47,000 midwives, and 550,000 other hospital workers (most of them women).[68] In recent decades, professionalization has moved nursing degrees out of RN-oriented hospital schools and into community colleges and universities. Specialization has brought numerous journals to broaden the knowledge base of the profession. World War I Britain By the beginning of World War I, military nursing still had only a small role for women in Britain; 10,500 nurses enrolled in Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS) and the Princess Mary's Royal Air Force Nursing Service. These services dated to 1902 and 1918, and enjoyed royal sponsorship. There also were Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurses who had been enrolled by the Red Cross.[69] The ranks that were created for the new nursing services were Matron-in-Chief, Principal Matron, Sister and Staff Nurses. Women joined steadily throughout the War. At the end of 1914, there were 2,223 regular and reserve members of the QAIMNS and when the war ended there were 10,404 trained nurses in the QAIMNS.[37] Grace McDougall (1887–1963) was the energetic commandant of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), which had formed in 1907 as an auxiliary to the home guard in Britain. McDougall at one point was captured by the Germans but escaped. The British army wanted nothing to do with them so they drove ambulances and ran hospitals and casualty clearing stations for the Belgian and French armies.[70][71] Canada When Canadian nurses volunteered to serve during World War I, they were made commissioned officers by the Royal Canadian Army before being sent overseas,[72] a move that would grant them some authority in the ranks, so that enlisted patients and orderlies would have to comply with their direction. Canada was the first country in the world to grant women this privilege. At the beginning of the War, nurses were not dispatched to the casualty clearing stations near the front lines, where they would be exposed to shell fire. They were initially assigned to hospitals a safe distance away from the front lines. As the war continued, however, nurses were assigned to casualty clearing stations. They were exposed to shelling, and caring for soldiers with "shell shock" and casualties suffering the effects of new weapons such as poisonous gas, as Katherine Wilson-Sammie recollects in Lights Out! A Canadian Nursing Sister’s Tale.[73] World War I was also the first war in which a clearly marked hospital ship evacuating the wounded was targeted and sunk by an enemy submarine or torpedo boat, an act that had previously been considered unthinkable, but which happened repeatedly (see List of hospital ships sunk in World War I). Nurses were among the casualties. Canadian women volunteering to serve overseas as nurses overwhelmed the army with applications.[67] A total of 3,141 Canadian "nursing sisters" served in the Canadian Army Medical Corps and 2,504 of those served overseas in England, France and the Eastern Mediterranean at Gallipoli, Alexandria and Salonika. By the end of the First World War, 46 Canadian Nursing Sisters had died[72] In addition to these nurses serving overseas with the military, others volunteered and paid their own way over with organizations such as the Canadian Red Cross, the Victorian Order of Nurses, and St. John Ambulance. The sacrifices made by these nurses during the War in fact gave a boost to the women's suffrage movement in many of the countries that fought in the war. The Canadian Army nursing sisters were among the first women in the world to win the right to vote in a federal election; the Military Voters Act of 1917 extended the vote to women in the service such as Nursing Sisters. Australia Sister Grace Wilson of the 3rd Australian General Hospital on Lemnos. She sailed from Sydney, New South Wales on board RMS Mooltan on 15 May 1915.[74] Australian nurses served in the war as part of the Australian General Hospital. Australia established two hospitals at Lemnos and Heliopolis Islands to support the Dardanelles campaign at Gallipoli. Nursing recruitment was sporadic, with some reserve nurses sent with the advance parties to set up the transport ship HMAS Gascoyne while others simply fronted to Barracks and were accepted, while still others were expected to pay for their passage in steerage. Australian nurses from this period became known as "grey ghosts" because of their drab uniforms with starched collar and cuffs. During the course of the war, Australian nurses were granted their own administration rather than working under medical officers. Australian Nurses hold the record for the maximum number of triage cases processed by a casualty station in a twenty four hour period during the battle of Passchendale. Their work routinely included administering ether during haemostatic surgery and managing and training medical assistants (orderlies).[75] Some 560 Australian army nurses served in India during the war, where they had to overcome a debilitating climate, outbreaks of disease, insufficient numbers, overwork and hostile British Army officers.[76] Interwar Surveys in the U.S. showed that nurses often got married a few years after graduation and quit work; other waited 5 to 10 years for marriage; careerists some never married. By the 1920s increasing numbers of married nurses continued to work. The high turnover meant that advanvcement could be rapid; the average age of a nursing supervisor in a hospital was only 26 years. Wages for private duty nurses were high in the 1920s -- $1300 a year when working full-time in patients' homes or at their private rooms in hospitals. This was more than double what a woman could earn as a teacher or in office work. Rates fell sharply when the Great Depression came in 1929, and continuous work was much harder to find.[77] World War II Canada Over 4000 women served as nurses in uniform in the Canadian Armed Forces during the Second World War. They were called "Nursing Sisters" and had already been professionally trained in civilian life. However, in military service they achieved an elite status well above what they had experienced as civilians. The Nursing Sisters had much more responsibility and autonomy, and had more opportunity to use their expertise, then civilian nurses. They were often close to the front lines, and the military doctors – all men – delegated significant responsibility to the nurses because of the high level of casualties, the shortages of physicians, and extreme working conditions.[78][79] Australia centaur poster In 1942, sixty five front line nurses from the General Hospital Division in British Singapore were ordered aboard the Vyner Brook and Empire Star for evacuation, rather than caring for wounded. The ships were strafed with machine gun fire by Japanese planes. Sisters Vera Torney and Margaret Anderson were awarded medals when they could find nothing else on the crowded deck and covered their patients with their own bodies. A version of this action was honoured in the film Paradise Road. The Vyner Brook was bombed and sank quickly in shallow water of the Sumatra Strait and all but twenty-one were lost at sea, presumed drowned. The remaining nurses swam ashore at Mentok, Sumatra. The twenty-one nurses and some British and Australian troops were marched into the sea and killed with machine gun fire in the Banka Island massacre. Sister Vivian Bullwinkel was the only survivor. She became Australia's premier nursing war hero when she nursed wounded British soldiers in the jungle for three weeks, despite her own flesh wound. She survived on the charity provided by Indonesian locals, but eventually hunger and the privations of hiding in mangrove swamp forced her to surrender. She remained imprisoned for the remainder of the war. At around the same time, another group of twelve nurses stationed at the Rabaul mission in New Guinea were captured along with missionaries by invading Japanese troops and interred at their camp for two years. They cared for a number of British, Australian and American wounded. Toward the end of the war, they were transferred to a concentration camp in Kyoto and imprisoned under freezing conditions and forced into hard labour. Australian sisters United States [icon] This section requires expansion. (September 2012) As Campbell (1984) shows, the nursing profession was transformed by World War Two. Army and Navy nursing was highly attractive and a larger proportion of nurses volunteered for service higher than any other occupation in American society.[80][81] The public image of the nurses was highly favorable during the war, as the simplified by such Hollywood films as "Cry 'Havoc'" which made the selfless nurses heroes under enemy fire. Some nurses were captured by the Japanese,[82] but in practice they were kept out of harm's way, with the great majority stationed on the home front. However, 77 were stationed in the jungles of the Pacific, where their uniform consisted of "khaki slacks, mud, shirts, mud, field shoes, mud, and fatigues."[83][84] The medical services were large operations, with over 600,000 soldiers, and ten enlisted men for every nurse. Nearly all the doctors were men, with women doctors allowed only to examine the WAC.[85] Britain During World War II, nurses belonged to Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS), as they had during World War I, and as they remain today. (Nurses belonging to the QAIMNS are informally called "QA"s.) Members of the Army Nursing Service served in every overseas British military campaign during World War II, as well as at military hospitals in Britain. At the beginning of World War II, nurses held officer status with equivalent rank, but were not commissioned officers. In 1941, emergency commissions and a rank structure were created, conforming with the structure used in the rest of the British Army. Nurses were given rank badges and were now able to be promoted to ranks from Lieutenant through to Brigadier.[86] Nurses were exposed to all dangers during the War, and some were captured and became prisoners of war. Germany Germany had a very large and well organized nursing service, with three main organizations, one for Catholics, one for Protestants, and the DRK (Red Cross). In 1934 the Nazis set up their own nursing unit, the Brown Nurses, absorbing one of the smaller groups, bringing it up to 40,000 members. It set up kindergartens, hoping to seize control of the minds of the younger Germans, in competition with the other nursing organizations. Civilian psychiatric nurses who were Nazi party members participated in the killings of invalids, although the process was shrouded in euphemisms and denials.[87] Military nursing was primarily handled by the DRK, which came under partial Nazi control. Front line medical services were provided by male medics and doctors. Red Cross nurses served widely within the military medical services, staffing the hospitals that perforce were close to the front lines and at risk of bombing attacks. Two dozen were awarded the highly prestigious Iron Cross for heroism under fire. They are among the 470,000 German women who served with the military.[88] |
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