"To know where you’re going," someone once said, "you have to know where you’ve been." If success during the past 100 years is measured by commitment, and worth counted by contribution, then nursing has a rich history indeed.

Nursing care may not have made headlines, overshadowed, perhaps, by medical innovations. Still, when it comes to health and healing, nursing has been there every step of the way. For every Jonas Salk, there was a Lillian Wald, for every Sigmund Freud, a Hildegard Peplau. In a century so dominated by discoveries, nursing made its own breakthroughs, bringing new meaning to the word "care" and laying the foundation for another kind of bridge — between science and humanity.

With such a proud professional heritage, as partially outlined here, today’s nurses will cross over to the next millennium bolstered by the courage, commitment, and perseverance of their forebears, and, we expect, ready and able to make a little history of their own.

Happy New Year from the staff of Nursing Spectrum!

1900 - The first issue of the American Journal of Nursing is published. Its editor, Sophia French Palmer, was one of the first nurses to campaign for state licensing and assisted in formulating much of nursing registration legislation.

1901 - The International Council of Nursing, established in 1899, holds its first meeting at the World Exposition in Buffalo, NY.

1901 - Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia are the first states to organize state nursing associations. By 1909, 33 states would form nursing associations.

1901 - The Army Nurse Corps is established with an exclusively female rank and file. Male nurses would not be permitted to serve as military nurses until after the Korean War in the 1950s. Once men were again allowed into Army nursing, their numbers increased in civilian nursing as well.

1903 - North Carolina is the first state to pass a registration law for nurses. New Jersey, New York, and Virginia follow with their own laws the same year.

1908 - The National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses is formed. Mary Mahoney, the first professional black nurse, gives the welcome address at the organization's first conference in 1909.

1909 - The School of Nursing of the University of Minnesota becomes the first nursing school organized as an integral part of a university.

1909 - Lillian Wald urges the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to organize a visiting nurse department at the Henry Street Settlement in New York City. The program was later extended to the company's industrial policyholders and served as the foundation for modern-day insurance nursing.

1909 - The nursing service of the American Red Cross (ARC) is formed. Jane Delano, head of the Army Nurse Corp who had served as a volunteer under then head of the Red Cross Clara Barton, became the nursing service's first chief. During World War I, the ARC recruited and equipped 49 Army base hospitals and eight Navy base hospitals with nurses, in addition to its own hospitals.

1910 - Florence Nightingale dies, as does Isabel Adams Hamptom Robb, an innovative educator who established the Johns Hopkins School for Nurses and served as the first president of the American Nurses Association.

1911 - The American Nurses Association succeeds the Nurses Associated Alumnae of the US.

1912 - The American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools is renamed the National League of Nursing Education.

1914 - Martha Rogers, a nursing scientist who would eventually be known as one of the greatest promoters of nursing as a science, is born in Dallas, TX.

1915 - Edith Cavell, a nurse who cared for soldiers of all armies during World War I and who directed the escape of French and Belgian soldiers from prisoner camps, is arrested and executed by a German firing squad.

1916 - Margaret Sanger opens the first birth control clinic in the US. She serves 30 days in the workhouse in 1917 for "maintaining a public nuisance," but this and other legal difficulties only serve to garner public sympathy for her work. Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, organized the first World Population Conference, and served as the first president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

1916 - Two five-year bachelor degree nursing programs are established at Teachers College in New York.

1917 - Forty-five states have enacted practice acts defining nursing practice and adopting the term "registered nurse."

1917 - The US enters World War I. M. Adelaide Nutting organizes the National Emergency Committee on Nursing to meet growing military and civilian demands for nursing services. As the war wages on, the Army Nurse Corps grows to 21,000 nurses; nearly 1,500 nurses serve in the Navy.

1918 - Nurses respond across the US to a flu epidemic of unprecedented proportions. Worldwide, the Spanish flu claims the lives of more individuals than World War I. The Red Cross Town and Country Nursing Service is transformed into the Bureau of Public Health Nursing Service and assumes the responsibility of improving sanitary conditions in Army camps along the eastern seaboard hit hard by the flu outbreak.

1918 - Mary Sewall Gardner accepts the position of chief nurse of the American Red Cross Tuberculosis Commission for Italy to direct Red Cross efforts during World War I. She wrote the book Public Health Nursing, the first American text on the subject.

1919 - Lucy Minnegerode is appointed as the superintendent of nurses for the US Public Health Service (PHS). Nurses had become an integral part of public health programs, staffing Ellis Island, as well as various PHS hospitals and clinics.

1920 - Julia Catherine Stimson, superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps, is the first woman to receive the rank of major in the US Army.

1920 - The US Army School of Nursing is founded.

1922 - Six nursing students and their director of nursing at Indiana University found Sigma Theta Tau. The women recognized the value of scholarship and the importance of excellence in practice. In addition, they wanted to build a framework to encourage future leaders to effectively improve healthcare. The founders were Mary Tolle, Edith Moore, Marie Hippensteel, Dorothy Garrigus, Elizabeth Russell, and Elizabeth McWilliams.

1923 - The Goldmark Report, a landmark study on nursing and nursing education in the US, is released. Among its recommendations: a call for additional training beyond the basic nursing course for superintendents, supervisors, instructors, and public health nurses.

1924 - Annie Warburton Goodrich, a contributor to the success of the Henry Street Settlement, becomes dean of the nursing program at Yale University, the first nursing school to be established as a separate university department with its own budget.

1925 - Mary Breckinridge introduces a model rural healthcare system into the US. To provide professional services to neglected people in southeastern Kentucky, she creates a decentralized system of nurse-midwives, district nursing centers, and hospital facilities. Originally called the Kentucky Committee for Mothers and Babies and later the Frontier Nursing Service, the system lowers the rate of death in childbirth in Leslie County, KY, from the highest in the nation to substantially below the national average.

1926 - Professional private duty nurses are working for a wage of 49 cents an hour, while cleaning women earn 50 cents per hour. By 1928, more than 69% of the nursing workforce works in private duty nursing, with duties that often include domestic chores.

1929 - The stock market crashes, and nurses, particularly private duty nurses, are hit as hard with unemployment as other US workers. In 1932, the American Nurses Association tackles the problem by proposing hospital hiring of graduate nurses, beginning a trend in nursing employment that would last decades.

1929 - The American College of Nurse-Midwives is formed by staff from the Frontier Nursing Service.

1931 - A survey by the federal Women's Bureau conducted during the Depression finds that, on average, nurses with less than five years of experience have median earnings of $1,650. To earn an equal amount, teachers and secretaries would have to have worked for 10 years, bookkeepers and stenographers 15 years.

1933 - The Civil Works Administration provides funds to employ 300 needy nurses.

1933 - The National Recovery Act sets an eight-hour work day and 48-hour work week or nurses.

1934 - New York University begins PhD and EdD programs in nursing.

1936 - Approximately 6,000 nurses are employed on Works Progress Administration projects.

1936 - Sigma Theta Tau is the first organization in the US to fund nursing research. Since 1936, the society has underwritten more than 250 grants to cultivate new knowledge.

1936 - In recognition of her outstanding example to nurses of all races, the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) establishes the Mary Mahoney Award. When NACGN merges with the American Nurses Association in 1951, the award is continued. Today, the Mary Mahoney Award is bestowed biennially in recognition of significant contributions in interracial relationships.

1938 - A nurses' monument (Spirit of Nursing) is dedicated in Arlington National Cemetery.

1940 - Lillian Wald dies. In 1893, Wald founded the forerunner of the Henry Street Settlement, which eventually evolved into the Visiting Nurse Service for New York City. She helped initiate revision of child labor laws, improved housing conditions in tenement districts, and worked for enactment of pure food laws, education for the mentally disabled, and enlightened immigration regulations.

1941 - The US and Great Britain enter World War II and, with a rising need for nursing services both at home and abroad, a nursing shortage begins. To combat a looming crisis, the US Cadet Nurse Corps is formed, and 123,000 nurses receive government-subsidized training.

1942 - US military nurses are taken as prisoners of war in the Philippines; they are held for 37 months and freed in 1945. The 1943 movie So Proudly We Hail, starring Claudette Colbert, is based on their experiences. In 1999, Elizabeth Norman writes about their story in the book We Band of Angels.

1942 - The American Association of Industrial Nurses is formed and establishes standards for occupational and industrial nursing.

1943 - The first class of Army flight nurses graduate.

1943 - Florence Aby Blanchfield is named superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps. World War II generated a critical need for nurses, and under Blanchfield's leadership, the Corps was expanded from approximately 1,000 to a force of 57,000 nurses. Blanchfield received the Distinguished Service Medal in 1945.

1945 - As World War II intensifies, President Franklin D. Roosevelt calls for a draft of nurses. The Nurses Selective Service Act makes its way through Congress, but nurses voluntarily respond to the call. By the end of the war later in the year, more than 30% of all active nurses had served in the US Armed Forces.

1945 - The Sister Kenny Foundation is established to fund research grants for the development of a live oral polio vaccine. Sister Elisabeth Kenny revolutionized treatment of polio and became a pioneer in the development of physical therapy by rejecting accepted medical practice of immobilizing the limbs of paralytic polio victims in braces and casts and instead promoted physical therapy techniques that encouraged the use of paralyzed limbs.

1947 - Nurses receive full commission rank in the US military.

1948 - M. Adelaide Nutting dies.

1948 - Hildegard Peplau, who becomes regarded as the "mother of psychiatric nursing," writes her seminal book Interpersonal Relations in Nursing. Publication is delayed for four years, however, because it is considered too revolutionary for a nurse to publish a book without a physician coauthor.

1948 - The report Nursing for the Future, also known as the Brown Report, recommends that nursing education be provided in colleges and universities but is met with hostility by physicians and hospital administrators. A follow-up report, A Program for the Nursing Profession, predicts the development of two levels of nursing: professional registered nurse and semiprofessional licensed practical nurse.

1949 - The US Air Force Nurse Corps is established.

1949 - Lucile Petry Lione of the US Public Health Services becomes the first nurse and first woman to achieve the rank of assistant surgeon general, the equivalent of rear admiral.

1950 - The Korean War breaks out. Nurses provide care in Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) units. A shortage of nurses that began during World War II continues throughout the decade.

1952 - The first issue of Nursing Research is published.

1952 - A pilot project for associate degree programs begins with seven junior and community colleges and one hospital from each of six regions of the US. The idea for the program originated with Mildred Montag of Teachers College.

1952 - The National Student Nurses Association is established.

1953 - Team nursing is introduced as a model of care.

1954 - Annie Goodrich dies.

1955 - The American Nurses Foundation is founded as the research education and charitable affiliate of the American Nurses Association.

1956 - In response to the Hill-Burton Act, which expanded hospitals across the country and intensified the need for nurses, Congress enacts the Health Amendments Act to provide financial aid for federal training programs.

1956 - Katherine J. Hoffman is the first nurse in the state of Washington to earn a PhD. Throughout a career that spanned most of the century, Hoffman fought for the principle that nursing research was vital to the development of nursing as a profession and a science. She was one of the founders of the Western Society for Research in Nursing and eventually established the nurse-scientist program at the University of Washington in 1963.

1962 - Ten Army nurses arrive in Vietnam. By 1966, 300 military nurses would be serving in the war-torn country; by 1973, more than 5,000 nurses would see action in Vietnam.

1963 - The Loeb Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation is established at Montefiore Hospital in New York City with the goal modeling the high quality of nursing care given only by registered nurses.

1963 - General duty nurses' annual salaries, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, hover at $4,500. Teachers' salaries averaged $6,325 and secretaries $5,170.

1963 - Nurses join the Civil Rights Movement and 200,000 marchers on Washington, DC. They would later be equally involved in protests of the Vietnam War and support of the Equal Rights Amendment.

1964 - The Nurse Training Act is passed. The act provides significant financial support for nursing education.

1965 - Congress passes Medicare and Medicaid legislation, enabling a growing elderly population to receive healthcare services. Coupled with medical advancements, such as the development of hospital coronary care units and the introduction of vaccines for polio and the measles, as well as penicillin and chemotherapy, people begin to live longer and receive better healthcare services. The demand for nurses grows.

1965 - The American Nurses Association adopts a position paper on nursing education that calls for baccalaureate education for future practitioners. The debate over minimum educational requirements for nurses continues today.

1965 - The nurse practitioner is introduced as a specialty at the University of Colorado.

1965 - The war in Vietnam revisits the possibility of a draft of nurses, but consensus across the country holds that nurses cannot be drafted unless all women are subject to the draft.

1966 - Male nurses are appointed to regular Army, Navy, and Air Force Corps.

1969 - Sharon Lane from Canton, OH, dies from enemy rocket fire in Vietnam. She is the only woman and only nurse to die as a result of hostile fire. Her alma mater, Aultman Hospital School of Nursing, later erects a memorial to her.

1969 - The American Association of Colleges of Nursing is established.

1971 - Dorothy Smith, a Florida Nurses Association member, retires from the University of Florida College of Nursing. Smith was the founding dean of the college of nursing (1956) and chief of nursing practice at the university's teaching hospital.

1971 - The National Black Nurses Association is established.

1973 - The North American Nursing Diagnosis (NANDA) is formed. Nursing diagnosis becomes part of the nursing lexicon.

1975 - The American Nurses Association holds a ceremony to honor the first certified nurses.

1975 - Florence S. Wald develops a hospice model that provides holistic and humanistic care for dying persons.

1976 - The American Nurses Association (ANA) Hall of Fame for nurses is launched. First inductees include Isable Adams Hamptom Robb, who, among other accomplishments, was ANA's first president; Mary Adelaide Nutting, who, when she accepted the chairmanship of the newly developing department of nursing education at Teachers College, Columbia University, became the first nurse ever to be appointed to a university professorship; Lavinia Lloyd Dock, who wrote Materia Medica for Nurses, one of the first nursing textbooks; Martha Minerva Franklin, who was one of the first nurses to actively campaign for racial equality in nursing and under whose guidance 52 nurses assembled to form the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in 1908; Isabel Maitland Stewart, who was instrumental in the early development of nursing research; and Adah Belle Samuel Thoms, who was a crusader for equal opportunity for blacks in nursing and who became an acting director at a time when blacks rarely held high-level positions.

1979 - The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Nursing Center opens. It is one of the first of a new trend of academic nursing centers.

1980 - The nursing case management model is established at the New England Medical Center in Boston, MA.

1980 - The International History of Nursing Society changes its name to the American Association for the History of Nursing.

1981 - Estelle Massy Osborne dies. Osborne was the first black nurse in the US to earn a master's degree. In 1945, she became assistant professor at New York University, the institution's first black instructor.

1985 - The Nursing Minimum Data Set (MDS) is developed.

1985 - Sigma Theta Tau is incorporated as Sigma Theta Tau International, Inc., to support and connect the global community of nursing scholars who enhance healthcare worldwide.

1986 - The National Center for Nursing Research is founded, eventually becoming the National Institute for Nursing Research of the National Institutes of Health.

1986 - Iowa emergency nurse Barbara Fassbinder becomes one of the first healthcare workers to contract AIDS on the job. She worked throughout the remaining years of her life toward the development of standard precautions for healthcare workers.

1988 - Nursing Spectrum is established in Illinois. It grows to six divisions and a website <www.nursingspectrum.com>

1989 - Sigma Theta Tau International, Inc., dedicates the International Center for Nursing Scholarship, designed to serve as a "think tank" for all nursing professionals.

1989 - The International Classification of Nursing Practice project starts.

1991 - Operation Desert Storm, the Persian Gulf War, begins. Women staff almost 40% of the military medical units.

1993 - The Women's Vietnam Memorial is dedicated in Washington, DC. It is the result of work by Diane Carlson Evans and Donna-Marie Boulay, former Army nurses who served in Vietnam.

1994 - Advanced practice nurses gain admitting privileges at Columbia University. Three years later, the university would establish the first faculty group practice in nursing, the Columbia Advanced Practice Nurse Associates, a primary care practice that is reimbursed for advanced practice services at the same rate as physicians.

1999 - Hildegard Peplau dies.

1999 - The International Council of Nurses celebrates its centennial. It is the oldest of all international organizations for professional workers.

1999 - The Minority Nurses Coalition is established.

Bibliography

American Association for the History of Nursing. Available at: www.aahn.org. Accessed November 2, 1999.

ANA Hall of Fame Inductees. Available at: www.nursingworld.org/hof/alphalst.htm. Accessed November 2, 1999.

Donahoe MP. Nursing: The Finest Art. An Illustrated History. St. Louis, MO: CV Mosby; 1985.

Mullan, F. Plagues and Politics: The Story of the United States Public Health Service. New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc.; 1989.

Schorr, TM. 100 Years of American Nursing: Celebrating a Century of Caring. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; 1999.