Guys in nursing? No big deal, right? I had four guys in my class back in 1976 and it certainly didn’t strike me as unusual.

I have worked with male nurses in intensive care units and emergency departments throughout my career.

I started wondering. When did men decide to enter the nursing profession?

The answer blew me away.

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Florence Nightengale may be considered a pioneer in modern nursing, but long before Florence wrote her “Notes on Nursing”, there were nurses.

They were men.

India was the location for the first nursing school in 250 BC. Only men could be nurses because they were “pure”. The plagues of Europe found men willing to risk their own lives to care for others. The Parabolani, members of a Catholic brotherhood worked during the Black Plague, building hospitals.

In fact, many of the men who practiced nursing were part of religious or military orders. The Benedictine nursing order (founded by St. Benedict) and the Alexian Brothers (named for St. Alexis) are still working today.

Two patron saints of nurses are men: St John of God and Saint Camillus of Lellis. They started as soldiers and ended as nurses. We can thank St. Camillus for not only the “red cross” that we still use today, and he started the first ambulance service! (I always knew paramedics were saints, I didn’t know they owed their transportation to one!)

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We all know the name Clara Barton but men served as nurses in the Civil War, too. Walt Whitman was one of them. The Confederate army would designate thirty men per regiment as nurses.

In 1888, there were two nursing schools specifically for men: The Mills School of Nursing and St. Vincent’s Hospital School for Men.

Social conditions led to more and more women becoming nurses. As odd as it seems, female nursing organizations actually managed to keep men out of military nursing in 1901 when the Army Nurse Corp was formed (interesting that women/nurses had the power to do that in those days). The American Nurses Association formed in 1917 and excluded men until the 1930s. Once men were allowed back into military nursing after the Korean war, male enrollment in civilian nursing schools increased.

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So the next time you see a photo of Florence Nightengale, remember that she stood on the foundation laid by our earliest colleagues.

The men of the nursing profession.

I’m proud to work along side of them, anyday!

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Photo credit: http://media.marketwire.com/attachments/200206/139357_MZ-male_nurse1TN.jpg

And check out this wonderful slide presentation on The Story of Men in American Nursing, my basis for this column.