Florence Nightingale Research Paper

Words: 550
Pages: 3

The roots of contemporary psychiatric–mental health nursing thought can be traced to Florence Nightingale’s seminal work Notes on Nursing, originally published in 1839 Nightingale, (1859). The holistic view of the patient, with the body and soul seen as inseparable and the patient viewed as a member of a family and community, was central to Nightingale’s view of nursing. Although she did not address the care of patients in asylums, Nightingale was sensitive to human emotion and recommended interactions that today would be classified as therapeutic communication in the following history of mental health nursing from 1882 to 2000 (Boyd, M N. 2008:8). Three hundred years ago there was almost no organized provision for mentally ill patients in the UK, with the burden of care falling onto families or paid careers. For the indigent the poor law could offer outdoor relief, During the eighteenth century an array of lunatic hospitals, madhouses and asylums developed to treat patients with a mental illness and house those who were deemed incurable (Davies T 2009:23). …show more content…
Less severe nervous organic disorder has always been common in the general wards of voluntary hospitals, and was accepted as the responsibility of neurologists and other physicians; all forms of disorder were admitted to the infirmaries of workhouses. During the present century psychiatrists began to take an interest in non-certifiable mental illnesses and in working in general hospitals. Out-patient clinics became more common following the Mental Treatment Act 1930. The growth of general hospital psychiatric units in the last 30 years began amidst controversy, but has received little recent critical attention (Mayou R,