Historical Development of Modern Nursing - Essay Example

This means that they have the right to actively participate and collaborate with the healthcare provider. In order to achieve a maximum level of wellness, a nurse should be mindful of the consumer’s rights for the need for care. The environment, being a major determinant, ranges from the individual’s home to hospital agencies and the society. An individual’s environment is very important in determining one's health. Environmental factors can be psychological, spiritual, legal, political, and economical, among others.

Other temporal aspects that may determine individual’s health are the family, community, the general health care system and the individuals themselves. An individual’s genetic characteristics and life experiences determine the health factors. A philosophy has to understand that an individual’s life is a continuum which extends from a high level of wellness to cessation. Individuals have adaptive and recuperative abilities which determine the extent of altering ones health status depending on the movement of the individual on the continuum, either towards the positive or the negative as a response to the health care system intervention.

Wellness is a dynamic state of physical, psychological, spiritual and social well being. . This is because people performed it as a compassionate wish of helping others without the recognition of it as nursing. Mainly, it naturally belonged to women as a nurturing job, with an expectation of looking after the sick, the young and the elderly. At this age, there was no training in regards to care giving. In the majority of cases, it was based on experience and observation. They believed that illness came as a result of invasion by evil spirits to individual’s body.

Using magic, charms, hypnosis among others, people believed that medicine men and witchdoctors had power over the evil. The final option to send away evil spirits from a person involved trephining where a hole was drilled into the individual’s skull without anesthesia. Middle Aged Nursing During this period, crusaders, prisoners and religious orders provided care. There was no formal education or people under the direction of experienced nursing or any job training. Religious orders from Christian churches had basic nursing experience and provided guidance and direction.

At this period, there was Protestantism with followers confiscating hospital and school properties connected to Roman Catholicism. This made nursing go to the lowest level, with nurses fleeing for their lives. This created a shortage of nurses and many hospitals closed, leading to no provision for the sick and no care at all. This rendered nursing the work of less enviable women, drunks, prostitutes and prisoners. Because of the situation, cleric Theodore Fliedner and Frederika, his wife, set up the Kaiserswerth institution to train Deaconesses, which was the first formal training school for nurses in Germany.

At this school, Florence Nightingale