Nursing today, where many nurses don’t even work in a hospital, looks very different than nursing 100 years ago. Take into consideration how nurses are educated today, and the difference is even more profound. While not institutionalized until much later, formal nursing education has its origins in religion.
Even before the establishment of organized religion, the care of the sick involved spiritual leaders. Most ancient religions believed that illness was tied to a person’s spiritual well-being. The village shaman cared for the sick by casting out the evil spirits which were purported to inhabit a sick body.
As religion evolved, so too did nursing and the training and education that goes along with it. This month, the first of a five-part series, we take a look at the religious beginnings of Western nursing education.
The Earliest Caregivers
Hippocrates was one of the first caregivers to reject the mystical aspects of medicine as we know it. Hippocratic medicine involved whole-patient care, a concept foreign to early medical practitioners who saw a body as a sum of its parts.
This emphasis on the whole person became a foundation of nursing, which was still more instinctive in nature than truly practical or formal. Those who today would be called nurses cared for the sick because they wanted to. They learned by observing and doing, encouraged to church leaders to care for the sick as part of their faith.
This concept of practical charity was the main influence on the foundation of holy orders, and these were integral to the next phase of nursing education.
The Religious Apprentices
Prior to the dissolution of the monasteries during the Protestant Reformation, religious orders were the backbone of Western. The Catholic Church was involved in nearly every aspect of a person’s life, and sick care was no exception. Priests, especially Jesuits, were often doctors.
As they apprenticed for their lives as nuns, many women apprenticed as nurses trained to assist their religious brethren. The Order of Saint Benedict has been known for its medical care since the Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages also brought about a more systematic approach to sick are as a concept, with Charlemagne declaring that all cathedrals and monasteries have hospitals. Thus, apprentice nursing began to spread throughout the Western world, with monks and nuns caring for the sick and training their successors.
Thanks to the dissolution of the monasteries, nursing returned to the secular realm, becoming more practical in nature. For the next two centuries, sick care was again in the domain of the home and formalized nursing education virtually disappeared.
As the modern era began, training for nurses was once again formalized, but in a decidedly different manner. Return next month for a discussion of practical nurse training.