nabeepchen

A few days ago, I began a post about nurses and angels. Or angels and nurses. Or the hybrid nurse-angel, that has been born of myth and legend, and continues to haunt and infect the nursing profession like an Ebola virus.

The dictionary gives a long list of definitions for angels, and not surprisingly, the word “nurse” is not mentioned once. A few of the definitions are as follows:

• A spiritual, celestial being, superior to man in power and intelligence. In the Scriptures the angels appear as God’s messengers.
• In both Hebrew and Greek, a word meaning “messenger,” and one employed to denote any agent God sends forth to execute his purposes.
• A celestial being, who is generally good as opposed to evil, that acts as an intermediary between heaven and earth.

Nurses do not have powers that are superior to anyone else, they do not act as God’s designated messengers, and certainly, no one I ever worked with acts as an intermediary between heaven and earth. Some nurses think and act like they are God’s gift to the healthcare profession–those afficted with the supernurse syndrome–but I’d hardly refer to that group as angelic. Demons might be a closer analogy.

Nurses are also not saints, not all sweet and good, and do not exist on a higher plane simply because they take care of the sick.

Blame it on Florence

I can’t say for sure that this angel nonsense began with Florence Nightingale, for certainly she was no angel and never aspired to be one. However, the image and myth (amazing how much mythology there is in nursing) of Nightingale propelled this idea forward full steam.

Traditionally, the sick and infirm have been cared for by religious orders. Nightingale changed that by creating a new type of nurse. Mind you, she was not the first nurse ever to walk the earth, although amazinging enough, I have seen her described as such, but rather, she believed that nurses should have degree of formal training, in schools run by, and taught by nurses. This was a revolutionary concept, to separate nursing and medicine, and in some ways, Nightingale was way ahead of her time. In contrast, however, she was very much a woman of her era, and mired in Victorian thinking and mentality.

But one thing for sure is that Nightingale was no angel. She is famous for leading a band of nurses to the Crimea, to care for sick and wounded British soldiers between 1854-1856. Conditions at the hospital were horrendous, and without a doubt, Nightingale and her nurses did work wonders. While in the Crimea, Nightingale battled with the army administration, and her behavior was anything but angelic. Also, the dramatic drop in the death rate, which was about 42% in the winter of 1855, has been falsely attributed to Nightingale. There was a defect in the sanitation system, and the number of deaths due to cholera and dysentary was far greater than those due to battle wounds. But Nightingale didn’t “fix” the problem. It was only after the War Office sent engineers to solve the problem, did the death rate decline to 2%.

Anyway, Nightingale became famous as the lady with the lamp, a semi-angelic figure who silently wandered the hospital hallways after dark, lighting her way with a little lantern. Nightingale cured fevers by just a touch of her hand on a fevered brow, the wounded men kissed her shadow, and never did a harsh word ever emanate from those sainted lips. Yes, Nightingale would be nauseated from reading that description of herself. There was nothing romantic about her two year stay in the Crimea, and in fact, she became quite ill herself.

But she was now an “angel of mercy” an “angel of the battlefield” and so one. Other angels of other battlefields followed, such as Clara Barton during the Civil War in the U.S. Again, I’m sure that Barton would have been just as miffed to hear herself described in such a manner. For starters, she was not a nurse but a patent clerk (the first female one in the U.S.), working in Washington DC when the war broke out. She was motivated to load up a wagon with supplies and take it out to the battlefield, not because she deeply desired to be canonized but because she was horrified at the red tape which was keeping those very supplies from the men who needed them. So acting in a very unangelic way, as in bucking the system, she took things into her own hands. And her nursing career finished as soon as the war ended.

So it is ironic that we have two very independent minded, strong willed women, and somehow they have been transformed into sugar pie angels. Instead of marveing over their strength, ingenuity, resourceful, and accomplishments, we shower them with celestial accolades.

Nightingale is responsible for both helping to create the nursing profession as well as making it into a lowly, poorly paid job. An angel’s job. She didn’t do it intentionally, and certainly, things could have changed in the 96 years since her death. But they didn’t. Why not? Well, because what could a hospital like better than being staffed by angels. What a great marketing scam, what a way to convince the help that they don’t deserve to paid, don’t need to take breaks, don’t need food…I think you get the idea.

Stay tuned for my continuing attack on the nurse-angel.

Angel image courtesy of Royalty Free Clip Art