[The following is in regards to the evolution of nursing practices in the early 20th century, primarily before and during the First World War, in America.]
Nursing was one of the few fields that gave women opportunity and status, and that they controlled. While Welch and his colleagues were revolutionizing American medicine, Jane Delano, Lavinia Dock – both of whom were students in Bellevue’s nursing program while Welch was exposing medical students there to new realities – and others were doing the same to nursing.
But they fought not with an entrenched Old Guard in their own profession so much as with physicians. (Sometimes physicians, threatened by intelligent and educated nurses, waged a virtual guerrilla war; in some hospitals physicians replaced labels on drug bottles with numbers so nurses could not question a prescription.)
Source:
Barry, John M. “The Tinderbox.” The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Penguin Books, 2009. 141. Print.
Further Reading:
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