9/19/14
Modern nursing owes much to Christian influences. Most
nursing, like most medicine, was carried out by monastic orders within their
own hospitals for centuries. In AD 650, a group of devout nuns volunteered to
take care of the sick at the Hotel Dieu in Paris, and most other nursing
followed this pattern. In the seventeenth-century, a parish priest shocked by
the conditions in the poor quarters of Paris, set up a nursing order under the
name of Dames de Charite. Civic and secular authorities were somewhat slow to
recognize the need for paid, rather than voluntary nurses. In the
nineteenth-century, 'modern nursing' was born, in no small measure due to the
work of Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale. Their revolution in the
practice of nursing included making it a more socially acceptable pursuit for
women. Florence Nightingale was deeply influenced by a small Christian hospital
at Kaiserswerth in Germany, run by 'deaconesses', a group of Protestant women.
Their response to biblical commands to care for the sick and educate neglected
children, provided the templates for modern daily hospital nursing. Florence
Nightingale encouraged better hygiene, improved standards and night-nursing, as
well as founding the first nursing school. Nurses gained professional status at
the end of the century, largely thanks to the work of Ethel Bedford Fenwick,
with the majority of nurses being inspired to serve by Christian ethics. Many
missionary nurses such as Mother Teresa and Emma Cushman have worked
tirelessly, bringing hygiene and Western medicine to the four corners of the
globe.
Luk 10:33 But
a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had
compassion.
Luk 10:34 He went to
him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his
own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him.
