The Nightingale Still Sings: Ten Ethical Themes in Early Nursing in the United Kingdom, 1888-1989
There is, by Nightingale’s intent, a centrality of “the moral” within nursing. The good nurse was to be a good woman as well, good in a moral sense. Her writings suggested that the qualities of a good nurse must first be the qualities of a good woman. Early American nursing leaders created an extensive body of literature specifically devoted to nursing ethics that included approximately 100 nursing ethics textbooks and editions. Unlike the American literature, the term “ethics” was rarely used in the United Kingdom (UK) nursing literature and there were few nursing ethics textbooks written by UK nurses. Despite this difference, UK journals and textbooks devoted considerable and ongoing attention to concerns that were specifically ethical in nature. This article describes the design and sources used in an extensive review of the UK literature, and describes ten ethical themes in areas that constitute continuing ethical threads in the first century of UK nursing literature from the 1880s to 1980.