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Your Life Isn’t About You
The struggle between service versus selfishness
One probably doesn’t think too much about contemporary nursing. It is considered a noble and necessary profession but perhaps the only thing anyone really questions is why nurses wear their watches on their chests.
It is done to minimize the risk of infections and is much easier to look down on the chest to see what time it is than to flick the wrist.
But the obvious nursing practices that we all take for granted weren’t always in place. In the Middle Ages, many hospitals were located in churches and monasteries. Nurses would travel from place to place to help, but monks and nuns also took on the role of nursing.
However, when the Reformation happened, these churches, monasteries and the hospitals within were shut down, leaving people with very limited access to healthcare. This went on for about two hundred years.
In the mid-1800s, the Crimean War between the alliance of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France versus Russia was being fought. A group of nurses from Britain was sent to Russia, including a nurse named Florence Nightingale.
When the nurses arrived, they were greeted by rotting animal corpses in the courtyards of the hospital. Inside, they saw piles of sewage, contaminated water and…
