Religion and Nursing

by

Sheryl Reimer-Kirkham

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0037

Introduction

The history of religion and nursing sees the two deeply entwined from time immemorial to today. Care of the sick—which is at the heart of nursing—has been true to every society and era. In the earliest forms, knowledge about caring was passed down through ancient scripts, folklore, and sometimes by accident. As religion became institutionalized, so too did the care of the sick, regardless of religious context. Nursing history narratives often refer to religious orders (men and women) dedicated to the care of the sick as the origin of nursing (and hospitals). Most typically, these references are to Christian religious orders, but more recent scholarship is revealing how nursing was also developing in other religious and nonreligious traditions. The era of military nursing in the nineteenth century helped turn nursing from oversight by religious leaders to secular nursing, most notably with the leadership of Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War (1853–1856) and her establishment of the St. Thomas Hospital and Nightingale Training School for Nurses in 1860. During the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, with European imperialism and colonial expansion throughout Africa and Asia and Latin America, missionary nurses motivated by charity, duty, and compassion were implicated in the imposition of Catholic, Anglican, or Protestant Christianity that displaced or merged with preexisting beliefs, even as they contributed to health services and nurses training. More recently, religion and nursing continue to be mutually influencing, though in less institutionalized ways. As societies secularized with the separation of church and state, and scientific and technological advancements drove health care, a concurrent move occurred in nursing theory and practice to distance from institutionalized (majoritarian) religion. As publicly funded and administered postwar hospitals and health systems were established, it was no longer the institution that was religious, though religious nurses might work in these presumed secular spaces. As is often the case in relation to religion, American exceptionalism shows a different pattern. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, amid growth of science, technology, immigration, and industrialization, private voluntary hospitals, including religious institutions, became firmly entrenched as American health-care providers. During this period, religious institutions started to compete with public hospitals and rival religious groups. Religious women as nurses played key roles as owners and administrators of these health-care institutions. From the 1980s onward, nursing discourse shifted from the influence of religion on health to the influence of spirituality on health. Critical perspectives on race, class, and gender as resulting in health inequities have increasingly been taken up in nursing since the turn of the twenty-first century, with some application to religion and spirituality. Decolonizing and feminist critiques have opened space for nonmajoritarian religions (often as racialized religion) and renewed attention to spirituality as those touched by illness or seeking well-being pursue meaning, connections, and transcendence.

The Need for Critical Historiography

This section provides an introduction to the type of issues that arise in the study of a history (and a bibliography) on religion and nursing. Compared to earlier descriptive histories, the study of nursing history has in the last decades taken more critical approaches to interpret history in light of modern culture and contemporary social theories. Also referred to as “revisionist history,” these new readings update or revise historical narratives. Critical historiographic methods can help to pinpoint what might be blind spots for nursing history. The articles in this section identify several such blind spots. Nelson 2001 criticizes the scholarly biases of historians that have discouraged attention to religious women. Similarly, Bradshaw 2013 names religion as a missing horizon for nursing history. Wall 2010 observes that the general field of nursing history has only recently picked up on the study of women and religion in a substantive way. Sweet 2007 makes the point that a similar blind spot exists in which nursing’s historiography is dwarfed by that of medicine (see also D’Antonio 2022). In addition, the triumphalist focus on Florence Nightingale has overshadowed other historic contributions to the development of nursing. Toman and Thifault 2012 and Nelson 1997 describe the challenge of developing historical thinking that is required for a balanced approach to the past, where there is a mutual reading without an over-imposition of today’s values and ideologies. As example, Rutherdale 2010 illustrates awakening interpretations of nurses’ complicity with colonial and racist government policies, even as they themselves were well-intentioned and altruistic, thus giving insight into the complexities of history telling and social life.

• Bradshaw, Ann E. “Gadamer’s Two Horizons: Listening to the Voices in Nursing History.” Nursing Inquiry 20.1 (2013): 82–92.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.1440-1800.2011.00584.x

  Offers a critical alternative to contemporary revisionist historical interpretive approaches that privilege analyses of race, class, and gender. Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer, the challenge proffered is for historical interpretation to be a mutual dialogue of the “then” and the “now.” Ann Bradshaw (and others) argue that religion has become a missing horizon of nursing history, on account of the secular positioning and investigative premises of historians.

• D’Antonio, Patricia. “Toward a History of Health Care: Repositioning the Histories of Nursing and Medicine.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 96.3 (2022): 285–308.

  DOI: 10.1353/bhm.2022.0027

  This positioning paper presents a new paradigm for the history of both nursing and medicine that will involve studying these actors and their practices in relation to each other rather than in isolation. Nursing and medicine needed each other to make their particular claims to authority and expertise and, in the end, to achieve the success of their “scientific agenda.”

• Nelson, Sioban. “Reading Nursing History.” Nursing Inquiry 4.4 (1997): 229–236.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.1440-1800.1997.tb00108.x

  A classic paper that takes up the discursive power of history and the challenge of reading the past through contemporary interpretive lenses. Discourse in nursing history typically frames nursing’s evolutionary march toward professional autonomy, such that it finds itself attempting to shed a backward or embarrassing legacy. Nursing history is challenged to stay relevant and, indeed, contribute to knowledge generation and theory development for the discipline, while maintaining scholarly credibility.

• Nelson, Sioban. Say Little, Do Much: Nurses, Nuns, and Hospitals in the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

  DOI: 10.9783/9780812202908

  Shifts typical scholarship with this critical account of the role of nineteenth-century vowed religious women (Catholic and Anglican nuns and Protestant deaconesses) in the development of nursing in the West. The critique is that most historians have scholarly biases that have discouraged attention to religious women, and Sioban Nelson argues that attention to religious sisters forces a revision of the standard narrative that credits Florence Nightingale with the reform of nursing.

• Rutherdale, Myra, ed. Caregiving on the Periphery: Historical Perspectives on Nursing and Midwifery in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queens Press, 2010.

  This edited volume is included in this bibliography because several of the nurses and midwives were affiliated with religious organizations (in Butcher’s chapter this involves an “ordinary” missionary nurse participating in the colonial process that dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their land), and in other situations, nurses and midwives provided care in religious communities, such as a Mennonite community with deep religious networks.

• Sweet, Helen. “Establishing Connections, Restoring Relationships: Exploring the Historiography of Nursing in Britain.” Gender & History 19.3 (2007): 565–580.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2007.00490.x

  A comparison of the history of medicine with that of nursing, with the parallel of both taking a triumphalist, descriptive approach, with biographies and institutional histories concentrating on a few key figures and training schools. The history of nursing attributes an iconic legacy to one person, such that there is an impression that nursing began with Florence Nightingale. In its pursuit for professionalism, nursing has distanced itself from its pre-reform “religious, unscientific and unremunerated past” (p. 573).

• Toman, Cynthia, and Marie-Claude Thifault. “Historical Thinking and the Shaping of Nursing Identity.” Nursing History Review 20 (2012): 184–204.

  DOI: 10.1891/1062-8061.20.184

  Drawing on a Canadian example of the development of undergraduate nursing history courses, the authors explore the development of historical thinking. Such thinking involves an orientation to the past informed by disciplinary canons of evidence and rules of argument (citing Wineberg), and yet, in the health disciplines, scientific discourses may discredit historical thinking as legitimate knowledge. The course has historical thinking applied to the religious and lay nurses in French Canada.

• Wall, Barbra Mann. “The Place of Religion as an Interpretive Tool in Nursing History.” Nursing History Review 18 (2010): 130–133.

  DOI: 10.1891/1062-8061.18.130

  In this editorial, Barbra Mann Wall observes that historiography often keeps religion at arm’s length. For nursing history, there has been a historical blind spot in the study of women and religion.