The professionalization of Canadian nursing, 1924-32: views in the CN and the CMAJ.

Abstract

This article provides an assessment of the attitudes of the nursing and medical elites to the professionalization of nursing in the 1920s, as expressed, respectively, in the Canadian Nurse and the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The material printed in the CN between 1924 and 1932 indicates that the nursing elite perceived three factors inhibiting professional development: the tension between the somewhat incompatible values of professionalism and sacrificing service upon which nursing was based; indifference within the nursing rank-and-file; and opposition from the medical profession. Material printed in the CMAJ in the 1920s indicates that there was opposition within the medical profession to nurses' attempts to achieve higher standards of education, self-regulation, and more recompense. The medical profession was not, however, unamimous in its opposition to the professional development of nursing. Much of the material printed in the journal on nursing, particularly toward the end of the 1920s, indicates that there existed among doctors a substantial amount of support for nurses' efforts. This study illustrates that over the course of the 1920s, a number of shifts in political alignments occurred between and among doctors and nurses. As the decade progressed, the medical profession became more supportive of nurses' efforts to professionalize; simultaneously, the nursing leadership drew further away from the rank-and-file nurses and placed itself in closer alliance with the supportive segment of the medical profession.