When looking into the history of nursing one quickly becomes aware of the women who is deemed the founder of modern day nursing Florence Nightengale. Florence is credited with changing the profession of nursing from one that was only suitable to nuns and the elderly, to one that was a respectable and open career choice for women. While it is possible to spend numerous posts exploring Florence’s contributions to health care for the purposes of this blog we will be focusing on how nursing became an organized vocation within Canada and the educational requirements in the early days of the profession.
In 1874 the first Dr. Theophillus Mack opened the first hospital training school in Canada in St. Catherines Ontario. This lay hospital (differing from a religious hospital) was opened with the assistance of two nurses who had trained under Florence Nightengale. In the first annual report Dr. Mack stated that “all the most brilliant achievements of modern surgery are dependent to a
great extent upon careful and intelligent nursing” (Baker et all 2012). It was clear from very early in Canada’s history that in order to have effective health care with positive outcomes there would need to be a focus on quality education for nurses.
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The education for lay nurses differed from that of the nuns in the religious orders. The most notable difference was the amount of focus given to religious rituals and prayer. While still part of the lay nurses education it was not as focused upon as in the religious hospitals.
Instead novice nurses in the Mack Educational Hospital would start their education by shadowing. Paying close attention to what senior nurses were doing in order to learn through observation. The next phase of their training would be to perform care themselves while being observed by more senior staff. Interestingly the final stage of nursing education involved shadowing a pharmacist in order to learn about the different types of medication being used and given to patients.
This focus on skills and being directly supervised has remained a vital component of nursing education up to the modern day. Interestingly legislation was just recently passed in Canada to allow registered nurses prescribing rights to certain medications, some 140 years after the first nursing education showed an emphasis on medication knowledge.
Nursing continues to develop as a profession and is regularly adapting the way in which new nurses are trained in order to best prepare new graduates for the responsibility of caring for people. In the next blog post we will explore what a nurses education looks like today and how the entry to practice requirements have changed in the past 40 years.
Resources
The Evolution of Education for Professional Nursing in Canada from the 17th to the 21st Century Retrieved from: https://www.casn.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/History.pdf
Learning How To Care 
Hi Gregory,
The education of nurses and teachers has definitely evolved in the last century and a half. When girls chose the profession of teaching they would briefly attend teacher college and then they would find themselves in a classroom.
Nurses were educated in vocational hands-on programs. They learned in authentic ways and directly from experienced nurses. I think that nursing today has come a long way in incorporating both the vocational and books (classroom) learning. Nurses today are expected to know so much more than they did in the past.
I was surprised to read this week in Cuban’s (2001) article that vocational training in schools dated back to the 1900s as a result of educational reforms of the 1880s.
Mariette
Cuban, L. (2001). Can historians help school reformers? Curriculum Inquiry, 31(4), 453–467. doi:10.1111/1467-873X.t01-1-00207
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Hi Gregory,
It was interesting for me to learn that nursing was ever considered anything other than a highly-respected profession. The quote you leave from Baker et al (2012) in one that I assumed was always the case, that “all the most brilliant achievements of modern surgery are dependent to a great extent upon careful and intelligent nursing” It is interesting to consider the role that education had on moving the profession of nursing forward to the profession it is today. The focus on shadowing described above seems like such a logical way to prepare for any profession. At teachers college, I found little value as a student in the University education classroom, but the practicums in high schools to be incredibly valuable. Sometimes, one can only learn by doing. Thanks,
Doug O’hearn
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Thank you Doug for your comment. It is interesting that so much of our education system seems to focus on the theory of a profession as opposed to the actual practice of it. Would workers not be better prepared if they were able to explore their chosen fields through more hands on practice similar to how the trades practice. I feel “white collar” professions have much to learn from “blue collar” apprenticeship program in order to best prepare future workers.
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