Nursing - Vocation or Profession?

By Frances Corkran

To the editor of the Baltimore Evening Sun, July 7, 1954

In response to the comment "nursing is a vocation rather than a profession and a girl (nurse) is trained rather than educated," I would like to say that fifty or a hundred years ago when professions were in a state of apprenticeship, we could speak of training individuals and not educating them. But we cannot speak so today.

If nursing is a vocation, we are certainly striving toward making it a profession. As medical knowledge, hospital medical care plans and specialization have increased, duties once delegated to interns have been taken over by the nurse. In order that a nurse may efficiently and intelligently care or direct care of a patient, she must not only be trained to meet the physical needs of the patient, but she must meet the psychological and social needs. The nurse must know the "whys" as well as the "know how." The medical profession is propounding more and more the mind and body concept in disease and the importance of assisting the organism to adjust to its post-hospital environment. Nurse with just "training" cannot carry this big order alone.

Just because a young woman chooses to become a nurse, must she forego the pursuits of knowledge that make for a fuller and happier life? Skills or tasks or training without knowledge make any position or vocation a monotony. The knowledge we bring to the skills that we perform is what is meaningful to the patient and to the nurse.

The practical nurse has a big place in the nursing profession in bringing physical comfort to the patient. We need collegiate nurses to teach the practical nurse knowledge and skill and to nurse the whole patient. The nursing profession is no longer an ivory tower or a separate entity but has relationships with many other branches of knowledge. The curricula in nursing schools indicate the awareness of the relationship of the nursing profession with other fields, and our curricula have to be geared to our times, not times of the past.

(Note: Mrs. Hall nee Corkran received her Masters in Education from the University of Maryland in 1956.)