Nursing as a Profession

Nursing as a profession has quite an old history in US. While the credit of reforming the profession goes to Florence Nightingale, in US its beginning was set around the early 19th century. The Nurse Society of Philadelphia was an early nineteenth century program that trained the women to take care of the women during childbirth and the postpartum period. Between the 1839 and 1850 around 50 nurses were employed by the Nurse society. As the civil war broke out there arose a need for taking care of the sick and the wounded. The number of the sick and the wounded was enormous and during the period around 2000 men and women were employed as nurses in both north and south.   During this period the nurses provided some commendable service and that, resulted in more experiments being conducted to set up training programs in nursing. One such program was initiated in Pennsylvania who first class graduated during the year 1869 (Whelan, 2016).  

The year 1873 proved a watershed year for the nursing profession in US and several new nursing programs were started then. By the year 1900 there were some 400 to 800 nursing schools operating inside US. The schools were ether affiliated with a hospital or owned by it and provided the students with two to three years of training.  These initial programs were little more than apprenticeship programs and they also had some significant shortcomings despite which they were quite popular with the hospitals as well as the students. Since then nursing has continued to grows as an occupation and during the world war I around 23000 nurses served in the military delivering care.  This number had increased to 78000 during the Second World War (Whelan, 2016). However, the occupation is highly demanding and it has been through severe ups and downs through its course of history. Today’s nursing is characterized by a shortage of nurses and other issues to. While nursing has become  a highly stressful job it is  also characterized by a lack of motivators.