In 1798, attendants at New York Hospital were lectured on the care of the sick. Before training schools molded nursing into a profession, nursing was considered menial work and recruits were untrained maids, drug addicts and alcoholics, while others came from prisons or almshouses.

In the early to mid 1800s, it was rare for the ill to seek the assistance of a doctor, let alone be admitted to a hospital where more patients died than were healed. Souls brave enough to accept admission into hospitals found poorly ventilated facilities infused with over twenty odd strains of virulent viruses permeating the stale air.

Soliders of the Crimean War

In Europe , training programs for nurses began in 1836 in Kasierwerth , Germany by Pastor Theodor Fliedner for the Order of Deaconesses, where the legendary British nursing reformer Florence Nightingale received her formal training. She went on to champion the nurse's cause on the battlefields in the Crimean War of 1854-56, a war in which more men died of disease than in battle. Following the war, she established a nurse training program at Saint Thomas ' Hospital in London . This model set the pattern for U.S. schools in the late 1800's.

Mary Ann “Mother” Bickerdyke
Union Army nurse &
chmpion of solider’s rights

Union General
William T. Sherman

The Civil War was for nursing in America what the Crimean War was for nursing in Europe . Mary Ann Bickerdyke, a Union nurse, administered care to enlisted men and later acquired the moniker Mother Bickerdyke. She championed soldier's rights, became a heroic figure in the eyes of Generals Grant and Sherman. Louise May Alcott, the writer, and Walt Whitman, the poet, were both Civil War nurses. Mary Ann Bickerdyke was the first woman to unite nurses by lobbying in Washington to secure pensions for Civil War nurses and veterans .

Civil War nurse, poet &
writer Walt Whitman

Civil War nurse & writer
Louise May Alcott

In 1873, a government survey counted 200 hospitals in the U.S. By 1910 there were 4,000 and 6,000 by 1920. Hospitals, in dire need of "trained" nurses, began incorporating schools into their facilities. The first hospital school of nursing in the United States was Philadelphia General. New England Deaconesses in Boston and Bellevue in New York City soon followed.

In 1890, there were 15 nursing schools in the U.S. , in 1900 there were 432, an almost 3000% increase. As the movement grew and more nursing schools opened their doors, the quality of hospital care rose dramatically. The wide acceptance of nurse training within a hospital setting and a dedicated labor force at a modest cost initiated a quiet revolution in health care that had more to do with the treatment of a patient as a human being than it did with the treatment of any single disease. In the early years of Beth Israel, when the annual budget was $9,000, the science of medicine was secondary to caring and nurturing.