The Nevada Nurses Association invites you to celebrate nursing in this regular feature, which looks at the actions and words of nurses who made a difference. This issue addresses the need to protect the word “nurse,” the image of nursing, and the early days of state registration for nursing.

In these days of casual dress and sometimes insufficient identification, the patient has to wonder which of the persons in the health care setting is the professional nurse. Worse yet, the consumer may be even more vulnerable at the doctor’s office, when an efficient young person wearing a scrub suit, with a stethoscope around her neck calls you into the room and says,: “I’m Patsy, the nurse.” An astute consumer, noting this person’s response (or lack of) to some real medical concerns might ask Patsy about her nursing background, and learn that she is “really a medical assistant.”

The need to protect the term “nurse” seems like a new problem. Yet, it is long standing, and we must be continually willing to address it. Here is an example from American Nursing A History: (book review, this issue)

So many Society girls had romantic notions about nursing, after the United States entered what became World War I in 1917, that Clara Noyes, Director of the Red Cross Bureau of Nursing, was flooded with applications. She wrote to her friend Adelaid Nutting in desperation:

Surely we need your prayers. There are moments when I wonder whether we can stem the tide and control the hysterical desire on the part of thousands, literally thousands, to get into nursing or get their hands upon it.

Tell Annie [Goodrich] of Albany that if I were not convinced before, I should be now that the most vital thing in the life of our profession is the protection of the word nurse.

Everyone seems to have gone mad. I talk until I am hoarse,, dictating letters to doctors and [to] women who want to be Red Cross nurses in a few minutes, not knowing the meaning of the word nurse and what a Red Cross nurse is. (p.199).

After the war, Clara Noyes assigned qualified Red Cross nurses to help develop nursing programs in recovering European countries and acquired Red Cross funds to build a nursing school in Bordeaux, “France. During America’s economic depression in America she designed programs for qualified Red Cross nurses to meet people’s health needs.

Noyes was firm about the need for nurses to stay current, to take ongoing coursework, and to be involved in their professional organization. She promoted postgraduate study and often contrasted the active interest of older physicians in continuing education with the indifference of older nurse graduates.

If we are a profession, then surely there is an absolute necessity for advanced study. If we wish to see this profession placed on a strong basis, then we must be strong as a body in the fundamental principles underlying our work. If we attempt to take a position in the front ranks of the progressive movements of the age and, what is more important, stay there, we must as individuals be thoroughly prepared, and this can only be done by courses of study which have been organized on a permanent educational basis. (1905)