Wet-Nurse
Here’s an interesting tidbit: the word ‘nursing’ is derived from a Latin word, ‘nutrire’, which means ‘to nourish.’ The word ‘nurse,’ on the other hand, also came from the Latin word ‘nutrice,’ which translates into wet-nurse. The word ‘nurse’ first occurred in around the early thirteenth century, according to the University of Connecticut’s Nursing Learning Community Director Thomas Lawrence Long. Long adds that the earliest work making use of the English word ‘nurse’ in the medical sense was Shakespeare’s ‘Comedy of Errors’ (1616).
First Secular Nursing School
One of history’s most famed nurses was Florence Nightingale, a British woman who trained and managed nurses during the Crimean War (1853-1856), who helped save many lives. She also changed how nurses are educated, trained, and perceived by the public, as well as being one of the founders of the first secular nursing school in 1860 at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. Now named the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, it is ranked as the #1 nursing school in the UK.