National Nurses Day

Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, to a wealthy British family. She was expected to marry and keep house. Instead, at 24, she announced her intention to train as a nurse, a scandalous career choice for a Victorian lady of her class. Nursing in 1844 was a low-status job, done by working-class women in filthy hospital wards. Nightingale went anyway. She trained in Germany, then took charge of a military hospital in Crimea during the Crimean War (1854-1856), where she transformed the conditions and dropped the death rate from 42% to 2%.

Her 1860 founding of the Nightingale School for Nurses in London, and her 1859 book Notes on Nursing established nursing as a trained profession. She emphasized hygiene, patient dignity, data-driven medicine (she was also a brilliant statistician, inventing the polar area chart), and the nurse's role as a patient advocate. Every modern nurse is, in a direct professional lineage, her heir.

In the United States, nursing became a licensed profession in the early 20th century. The American Nurses Association was founded in 1896. Today, there are more than 5 million registered nurses in the U.S., the largest segment of the health-care workforce. About 87% are women, though that balance is slowly shifting.

The road to National Nurses Week began in 1953, when Dorothy Sutherland proposed a Nurse Day and an observance was held in 1954. President Nixon proclaimed National Nurse Week in 1974, May 6 gained national recognition in 1982, and the ANA expanded it to May 6–12 in 1990, fixing those dates permanently in 1993. It begins on May 6 (National Nurses Day) and ends on May 12 (Nightingale's birthday). The pandemic years, 2020, 2021, 2022, put American nursing under stress no previous generation had faced. Many left the profession. The ones who stayed did heroic, underpaid work. This week is one small thank-you for a year-round job.

Four things people don't realize about American nursing:

Six paths within nursing, each its own world: