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PART ONE
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Is nursing a profession? Or is it a technical vocation? Or can it be a combination of the two? Most American nurses would say that nursing is a profession. What then is a profession? In 1915, Dr. Abraham Flexner presented a paper before the National Conference of Charities and Corrections in which he set down the criteria which have since been recognized as one means by which an occupation can be evaluated as to whether or not it has reached professional status. According to his standards, the professions:
1) involve essentially intellectual operations accompanied by large individual responsibility:
2) ___ are learned in nature, and their members are constantly resorting to the laboratory and seminar for a fresh supply ol facts;
3) ___ are not merely academic and theoretical, however, but are definitely practical in their aims:
4) ___ possess a technique capable of communication through a highly specialized educational discipline:
5) __ are self-organized, with activities, duties and responsibilities which completely engage their participants and develop group consciousness, and finally
6) .. .are likely to be more responsive to public interest than are unorganized and isolated individuals, and they tend to become increasingly concerned with the achievement of social ends.'
Most educators agree that nursing meets most of these criteria readily. For the past 50 years American nursing educators have been striving to complete the accomplishment of all the criteria by moving nursing education completely into thedomain of the institutions of higher education, and out of the responsibility sphere of service institutions,
The American Nurses' Association (ANA), the professional organization for ali nurses, issued a position paper in 1965 after much study of the nursing situation. Briefly, it recommended that all professional nursing education be the responsibility of educational rather than service institutions, and that the baccalaureate degree be the required beginning professional degree in nursing. To understand the uproar that the publication of this position paper caused in American nursing circles, one must look back into the development of American nursing and its educational systems.
EARLY NURSING HISTORY
From ancient ti mes in most cultures, the care of the sick, infirm, and aged has traditionally been the responsibility of female members of the household or family. In...