National Nurses United

Books_FNL with art 8/20/10 4:02 PM Page 15 Onward and Upward explicitly emphasizing its ability to prescribe. "A vigorous effort to remedicalize psychiatry should be strongly supported," a representative of the American Psychiatric Association said in 1977. From these efforts came the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which standardized the diagnosis process and radically expanded the field. A few years later the APA board of directors voted to allow pharmaceutical companies to start sponsoring scientific symposiums at its annual meetings. Whitaker attended one of these conventions in 2008 where he heard the incoming APA president ask the media to "help us inform the public that psychiatric illnesses are real, psychiatric treatments work, and that our data is as solid as in other areas of medicine." Rather than submitting to her request, Whitaker does just the opposite in a levelheaded and highly entertaining fashion.—Matt Isaacs A Short History of Nursing By Lavinia Dock, RN; G. P. Putnam's Sons ho among us hasn't heard the curiously uninformed and self-serving pronouncement that it's unprofessional for nurses to join and form unions? My use of the term self-serving isn't meant to be cynical; I believe it accurately describes the manipulative intentions of those who seek to restrain, control, and prevent nurses from exercising their legitimate power and right to engage in collective social and political advocacy on behalf of their profession, patients, and the public at large. In order to cast aside any pretense and set the record straight regarding the role of the professional nurse as an educated and (as circumstances require) militant social activist, it's instructive to revisit and review nursing history as documented by pioneering nurse historian, Lavinia Dock. Although A Short History of Nursing was first written and copyrighted in 1920 by Dock, many used copies of the third and fourth edition, coauthored with Isabel Stewart, are available for sale through popular online booksellers such as Powell's Books or Amazon. In A Short History of Nursing, Dock and Stewart document a rich history of national and international activism by nurses who understood the importance for the nursing profession to retain the ability to regulate itself in order to control the practice of nursing. The authors show the global development of modern nursing and describe the implications for future nurses. Dock was a contemporary and colleague of the first nurses, both nationally and internationally, who sought to organize and legitimize the modern profession of nursing. She was also among the first of the so-called radical feminists and joined the Equality W J U LY | A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 League of Self-Supporting Women in 1907 and worked with the New York Women's Trade Union League. She walked picket lines in defense of workers, and in 1913 urged the American Nurses Association to support the union movement. Stewart was an educator whose study of history strengthened her belief that women could not rise to the full demands of any vocation or profession without education and knowledge of the social conditions and needs of their day. She also believed the fullest development of professional nurses "was not possible without emancipation from the conditions of subjection under which women and nurses had suffered for so many years." In the introductory outline, the authors beckon us to study nursing history by stating, "The nurse who knows only her (sic) own time may be unable to estimate and judge correctly the current events whose tendency is likely to affect her own career." In particular, Dock believed it is important "to give workers an unfailing inspiration in the consciousness of being one part of a great whole." In this book Dock discusses the effect of the expansion of nurse training schools in England, the increasing number of nurses and the inevitable variation of professional standards which lead her to the realization of the need for nurses to become self-organized and self-governed. She advocated for the attainment of professional licensure, through state regulation of basic minimum standards of training as the "one portal" to professional life. It became clear that the young profession needed leaders who could form a strong association of its members, yet until the year 1887 there was no organization of nurses in any part of the world. Even in Great Britain, nurses had remained more or less dependent on the large hospitals. As schools multiplied and as small or special institutions opened courses, often inadequate for sound training, both economic and educational standards fell. In addition, the authors describe how numerous commercial middlemen preyed upon nurses and certain hospitals also exploited them in the private duty field. Dock credits some of the "younger" nurses who realized the danger and courageously set to work to organize to improve conditions and standardize educational programs. This was "the second revolution" in nursing, according to the authors, probably equal in its daring to Florence Nightingale's welldocumented reforms in hospital sanitation. Dock and Stewart report that social conventions remained "stubborn," and the idea of professional autonomy for nurses was entirely new and objectionable. This was proved true by the immediate hostility of the directors and governors of the large London hospitals. The directors and administrators perceived the economic implications of the nurses' demands and the impact on their ability to make a profit, should they lose control of their nursing "employees." The authors presciently observed that this was to divide the hospital W W W. N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G N AT I O N A L N U R S E 15

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