Just about every mainstream source, from the History Channel to Wikipedia, cites Nightingale, an upper-class lady of Victorian England, as the founder of modern nursing.
Her legacy pervades both the general public’s understanding of nursing and nursing itself: May is National Nurses Month because Nightingale’s birthday is May 12th, and the World Health Organization dubbed 2020 the Year of the Nurse and Midwife to mark Nightingale’s 200th birthday. (Of course, 2020 turned out to be the year of the nurse in ways no one anticipated.)
But, like most lone-hero narratives, this one is not entirely true: For one thing, Nightingale herself trained with a group of German deaconess nurses, something she could hardly have done if she invented nursing. She did become famous for advocating for nursing as a trained profession, but as she did so, she shrank nursing into a restrictive, exclusionary Victorian corset, constructing a version of nursing that conformed to rigid social mores, one divided by class, race, and gender—a reimagining of nursing palatable to British colonialism.
The idea of Nightingale, the lady with the lamp, as the prototypical nurse—this mythic origin story—has served to further white supremacy in nursing and to strip nursing history of its truer, broader kaleidoscopic power. The real history of nursing is utterly radical in its vastness—and in what it says about the care we owe each other. Maybe that radicalness is why that history has been so elided, even as nursing historians have sought to bring it forward.
In fact, nursing doesn’t have one origin story, but uncountable origin stories. Nursing is a thread running through all human history. Here is a highly unscientific and not-even-close-to-comprehensive tour: One of the first nursing schools was established more than 2,000 years ago in Ancient India, where health care was conceptualized as four equally critical pillars: The patient, the nurse, the medicine and the physician. Several hundred years later, the Roman empire built military hospitals staffed with professional nurses because it was understood that the empire rose or fell on the health of its soldiers.