Assignment: Controversial Bioethical Issues

As a woman, she was not able to hold an official government post, nor could she

vote. Historians have had varied opinions about the exact nature of the disability that kept her homebound for the remainder of her life. Recent scholars have speculated that she experienced posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from her experiences in the Crimea; there is also considerable evidence that she suffered from the painful disease brucellosis (Barker, 1989; Young, 1995). She exerted incredible influence through friends and acquaintances, directing from her sick room sanitation and poor law reform. Her mission to “cleanse” spread from the military to the British Empire; her fight for improved sanitation both at home and in India consumed her energies for the remainder of her life (Vicinus & Nergaard, 1990).

According to Monteiro (1985), two recurrent themes are found throughout Nightingale’s writings about disease prevention and wellness outside the hospital. The most persistent theme is that nurses must be trained differently and instructed specifically in district and instructive nursing. She consistently wrote that the “health nurse” must be trained in the nature of poverty and its influence on health, something she referred to as the “pauperization” of the poor. She also believed that above all, health nurses must be good teachers about hygiene and helping families learn to better care for themselves (Nightingale, 1893). She insisted that untrained, “good intended women” could not substitute for nursing care in the home. Nightingale pushed for an extensive orientation and additional training, including prior hospital experience, before one was hired as a district nurse. She outlined the qualifications in her paper “On Trained Nursing for the Sick Poor,” in which she called for a month’s “trial” in district nursing, a year’s training in hospital nursing, and 3 to 6 months training in district nursing (Monteiro, 1985).