HISTORY OF NURSING THEORY

The history of professional nursing began with Florence Nightingale. Nightingale envisioned nurses as a body of educated
women at a time when women were neither educated nor employed in public service. After her wartime service of organizing
and caring for the wounded in Scutari during the Crimean War, Nightingale’s vision and establishment of a School of Nursing
at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London marked the birth of modern nursing. Nightingale’s pioneering activities in nursing practice
and education and her subsequent writings became a guide for establishing nursing schools and hospitals in the United States at
the beginning of the 20th century (Judd & Sitzman, 2013; Kalisch & Kalisch, 2003; Nightingale, 1859/1969). Nightingale’s
(1859/1969) vision of nursing has been practiced for more than a century, and theory development in nursing has evolved
rapidly over the past 6 decades,