The Change of Nurse's Stauts According to the Status of Women II: From the post medieval epoche to late modern epoche

Choi, Soon Ock

Abstract

It is very important to establish precisely the historical phases of nursing. We nurses should try to acquire the central social position in the health management system in the near the future, the 21st Century. Therefore my treatise aims to orient the desirable phase of the history of nursing through the feministic survey of the history of nursing from the post medieval epoche to the modern epoche. During the time of the renaissance which gave morning light to the modern epoche the antique Athenian thinking of sex was again revived. Athenian excluded the women from the public and autonomous regions. All the medical activity, once dominated by the women, was misfortunately regarded as superstition acted by witches. Accordingly, the nursing women were to hunted as witches. In short, in the early modern epoche, women began to be excluded from the history of medical activities. In the middle modern epoche characterized by the enlightenment movement and early capital economic system, capitalistic patriarchal system began to be formed by change in the economic system. The status of women began to be greatly dropped below by the social distinction of the private dimension of home and the public dimension of job. The woman was deprived of even the occasion to get the official license of medicine and medical institutions were handed to the states or the powerful and rich merchants. Accordingly, nursing acted mainly in the nunnery as the total approach to the patients was destructed wholly and transformed into the means of earning the money. Therefore unprepared low class-women began to engage in nursing only for the money. From then on, nursing activity was tunneled through the dark age for 200 years. In the late modern epoche characterized by the contrast of the accumulated vast capital by industrialization and vast poverty of the peoples, feminism began to float over the surface for the acquisition of equality of men and women from England. A feminist, Nightingale insisted that the women as nurses should be responsible for the healthy life of man. She tried the professional nursing education for women. Accordingly she not only contributed to the intellectual progress of women but also inspired in women the consciousness of the professional job. She tired to realize the ideal of at-that-time-feminists by engaging in nursing all through life. She really paved the road to contemporary nursing. In the near the future, I will write to describe how the late modern epoche nursing has fallen into the dilemma through the 1st and 2nd world wars and matured capitalism and to consider contemporary nursing with the status of women. All these papers aim to give proper recognition of nursing and right orientation of the future 21st Century nursing.