There have been caregivers throughout human history. Where there is illness, you will find a caregiver of some sort in the picture. Florence Nightingale elevated the role of caregiver to that of a professional nurse during the Crimean War in 1854, when she brought standards of care and infection control to wounded soldiers. She started a school for nursing, but it was not the first school.

In 1836, a secular movement began when the Reverend Theodore and Friedericka Fliedner established a three-year course for nurses at their school in Kaiserwerth, Germany. Florence Nightingale visited this school in 1851. Graduates could dispense medications and nurse the ill and convalescing patients back to health. Sixteen hundred nurses had been trained here and at various Kaiserwerth motherhouses throughout the world by 1864. Kaiserwerth had a motherhouse as far away as Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Ms. Nightingale was from a well-to-do family in Britain and, after receiving an extensive education, she decided to devote her life to caring for the sick. She volunteered to go to Crimea in 1854 to work in the Turkish hospital in Scutari. The conditions appalled her. The Barrack hospital was dark, poorly ventilated and overrun with vermin. Nurse Nightingale taught the few trained nurses and orderlies there how to clean and disinfect the facility. As a result of her early infection control measures, the death rate fell from 40 percent to 2 percent within six months.

After the war, Nightingale returned to London and wrote about her adventures and findings. She also started her own school for nurses. Her book, Notes on Nursing, was published in 1859 and is still required reading in most nursing programs.

Nursing in America was still in its infancy at the start of the Civil War in 1861. As the war began, the only nurses in this country were members of religious orders such as the Catholic Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of Charity. They were quickly overwhelmed by the numbers of war casualties and the Army was ordered by the U.S. government to establish a nursing service. Dorothea Dix, who was sixty years old and had devoted her life to the reform of insane asylums, was picked to lead the nursing efforts for the war.

Nurse Dix set some rigid standards for the women who volunteered for the nursing service. She took in no one under thirty years of age and all applicants had to be plain looking. The uniform was a plain black or brown dress with no bows or hoops. The women wore no curls or jewelry. For the most part, the nurses worked in hospitals far from the battlefields. However, a young woman named Clara Barton took to the battlefields to bring her nursing skills to the wounded. She went on to found the American Red Cross.

Other famous nurses at the time were Mary Todd Lincoln, who worked as a volunteer nurse in Union hospitals, and Louisa May Alcott. Ms. Alcott wrote about her experiences as a Civil War nurse in her book, Hospital Sketches.

Harriet Tubman, a famous runaway slave, also served as a nurse in the Civil War. She was awarded a government pension in 1892 for the work she had done on the Sea Islands in South Carolina. What would all these nurses think about the advances in the field of nursing today?