Nursing Practice Essay

417 Words2 Pages
Nursing practice has developed from task focused delivery to client focused care. Discuss the following elements of nursing practice from a historical perspective and how the practice has changed as the nursing profession has developed over time.
-The way procedures are performed
-The historical perspective of nursing. “Woman is an instinctive nurse, taught by Mother Nature. The nurse has always been a necessity, thus lacked social status. In primitive times she was a slave, and in the civilized era a domestic.
Overlooked in the plans of legislators, and forgotten in the curricula of scholars, she was left without protection and remained without education” (VICTOR ROBINSON)
It is hard to define a nurse or its meaning, where it started, how it started, who started it?. All we know is what has been for told by prehistorians, archaeologists and anthropologists, the very definition of nursing is loosely translated into someone who Nurtures. However nursing is said to predate medicine and because of this it has created quite a relationship between the two.
During the Middle Ages nursing was practice without proper medicine. Before the Development of infection control, only those who were near death justified the risk of surgical intervention, and those who survived never lived for very long before the overwhelming sepsis knocked on their door. As we look back at the crusades and earlier years there was no training as such, it was a male dominated field for a while and then women were introduced, but only to look after their own kind

The development of germ theory by Louis Pasteur was a stepping stone for nursing development. As we progressed into the 20th century prophylactic antibiotic drugs, heat sterilization of instruments and microbial barriers are now used in containing infections.
Florence Nightingale was the first to advocate that
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