Assignment: Pressure Wounds

The Nursing Profession Responds to the Great Depression and World War II With the stock market crash of 1929 came the Great Depression, resulting in widespread unemployment of private-duty nurses and the closing of nursing schools with a simultaneous increase in the need for charity health services for the population. Nursing students who had previously been the primary source to staff hospitals declined in number. Unemployed graduate nurses were hired to replace them for minimal wages, a trend that was to influence the profession for years to come (MacEachern, 1932).

Other nurses found themselves accompanying troops to Europe when the United States entered World War II. Military nurses provided care aboard hospital ships and

were a critical presence at the invasion of Normandy in 1944 as well as in military operations in North Africa, Italy, France, and the Philippines. More than 100,000 nurses volunteered and were certified for military service in the Army and Navy Nurse Corps. The resulting severe shortage of nurses on the home front resulted in the development of the Cadet Nurse Corps. Frances Payne Bolton, congressional representative from Ohio, is credited with the founding of the Cadet Nurse Corps through the Bolton Act of 1945. By the end of the war, more than 180,000 nursing students had been trained through this act, and advanced practice graduate nurses in psychiatry and public health nursing had received graduate education to increase the numbers of nurse educators (Donahue, 1985; Kalisch & Kalisch, 1986).