A Tribute to Nurses
National Nurses Week begins each year on May 6, the day that Florence Nightingale, the founder of professional nursing, went to the Crimean War as a nurse in 1853, and ends on her birthday – May 12. During this week we acknowledge the excellence and dedication of those who choose the nursing profession. I grew up surrounded by nurses in a nursing home in Old Mystic, CT that my family owned and operated in the 1950s. My mother’s skills as a Registered Nurse also made her the go-to person for many emergencies around the village – cuts, burns and even broken bones, head injuries and emotional problems. Injured people would show up at the nursing home, like they do today at emergency rooms, except that she received no compensation other than the occasional basket of eggs or leg of lamb that might arrive later.
I can still see my mother rushing from the bedside of an elderly person and calmly cleaning and dressing someone’s bloody wound after an accident down the street. On another occasion, I remember her carefully positioning a child’s possibly broken leg after a fall from a tree. Eventually, Dr. Ryley or Dr. Fowler would arrive from Mystic, but watching my mother and her nurse colleagues in action, day after day, offered me firsthand knowledge that nurses were the unsung heroines. They were the first responders in the old days.
Nurses in war zones and military settings also did their job quietly and largely unnoticed, putting their lives in peril on […]
A Tribute to Nurses in War and Peace
As we recognize the anniversaries of the beginning of World War I and the end of World War II, it is chilling to realize that nurses were also at the battlefront, but barely noticed.
I grew up surrounded by nurses in a nursing home that my family owned and operated. The patients were mostly elderly people who had the usual physical and mental problems related to aging, but we lived in a rural area and my mother’s skills as a Registered Nurse also made her the go-to person for situations that were considered minor emergencies around the village – cuts, burns and even broken bones and head injuries. I can see my mother calmly cleaning and dressing a bloody wound caused by broken glass and, on another occasion, carefully positioning a child’s possibly broken leg after a fall from a tree.
Eventually a doctor would become involved, but watching my mother and her colleagues in action day after day offered me firsthand knowledge that nurses, even in civilian life, were unsung heroines. There is no comparison of what civilian nurses did to the horrors and chaos of serving as a nurse in a war zone, but nurses in military settings have done their job quietly and largely unnoticed, as well.
Thousands of women serving as nurses put their lives in peril on the battlefield over centuries and yet little is known about their experiences in war or exactly how many participated. Even appropriate financial remuneration has been meager and long in coming. Only at the end of the twentieth century did nurses’ […]
