Design: Historical argument, exposition, and narrative are used to highlight the thesis that Irish sisters created hospitals where a specific, socially beneficial type of nursing care could be provided.

Method: Historical methodology has involved seeking and evaluating evidence in primary sources located in the sisters’ archives. Specifically, methods of social and cultural history are used.

Population/Years: Irish immigrant sister-nurses in the United States will be the focus. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ireland was a fertile field for gleaning recruits for hospitals in America.

Findings: Irish sister-nurses were a significant presence in the labor force of American hospitals. Their strong sense of self, their optimism, and a rigorous Irish Catholicism that emphasized discipline, obedience, and devotion contributed in distinct ways to American nursing practice. Yet, much of nursing history has involved the study of an articulate elite group of women. By studying nuns as nurses, we see another history, one that predates the well-known tradition established by Florence Nightingale.

Conclusion: Fundamental changes in the organization and delivery of health care are challenging the role of health care institutions and redefining the nurse's position within the health care system. An understanding of the history of nursing offers a vital perspective on the political, ethical, and social forces that have shaped our nursing practice. Indeed, historical research provides the foundation of “evidence-based practice.”

Implications: This paper can enhance theoretical understandings of the links between nursing practice, ethnicity, gender, economics, and religion that have been invisible in much of modern scholarship.

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Back to 15th International Nursing Research Congress
Sigma Theta Tau International
July 22-24, 2004