An Educated Spirit

“Is anything the same?” asked a group of amateur historians reviewing evidence of enormous changes in nursing practice over the years: pictures of wards full of iron lung patients in the polio epidemics of the 1940s and 1950s, documents about smallpox and cholera epidemics and their impact on nursing, and the risky reality of tuberculosis nursing in past decades—none of these are on the radar screens of nurses today.

As we pondered this question, we came across an article titled “The Educated Spirit of the Nurse,” written by Richard Olding Beard (Beard, 1922a) It seemed that this article might answer our question, and I am delighted to say I believe it does just that.

Richard Olding Beard founded the University of Minnesota School of Nursing in 1909. He was a remarkable physician whose foresight about the profession of nursing was practically clairvoyant. His interest in nursing education began a few years earlier when he met Isabel Hampton, later Isabel Robb, at Johns Hopkins. Her passion about the importance of educating rather than simply training nurses convinced him that nursing should be taught in an academic rather than a hospital setting. By 1908, he had persuaded both the University of Minnesota School of Medicine and the Board of Regents that the university should open the first school of nursing in an academic setting. By 1909, the University of Minnesota School for Nurses (the name by which it was known until 1920) was established. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first continuously operating nursing school started in an academic institution anywhere in the world.

Beard wrote prolifically and eloquently and left an amazing body of work that provides deep insight into his wisdom and passion about health, about the role of women in the world, and about the impact nursing can make in advancing social justice. The significance of this particular article lies in his vision of the characteristics and qualities nurses should have and how these qualities should be advanced through the educational process.

In the opening paragraph, he supposes that a cross section of nurses is not so very different from a cross section of any other “calling” of women and men, including teachers or physicians. Then he says, “I wish it were. I have a feeling that it ought to be. The participants in a calling so distinctive as that of nursing should have a quality all their own” (p. 239).

There are three points of emphasis in Beard's article: the principle of intelligent selection of students, the principles to be used in the process of “educating the spirit,” and the mission that nurses thus educated have in providing health care.

He describes at length his beliefs about the selection of candidates to study nursing. He is very clear that a combination of “mature purpose and essential fitness” is a first requirement. “If we are to look for the spirit of nursing—the educated spirit of the nurse—we must have the material into which it may be fused” (p. 240).

Beard uses the word fitness to refer to maturity coupled with intelligence. He recognized that maturity is not always synonymous with age and suggested many ways to ensure that students of nursing have a mature purpose. At that time, a high school diploma was not required in most hospital training programs but was a prerequisite for being a college student. He felt that 2 years of liberal arts education would promote maturity.

Applying his views to the present, the phenomenal growth of postbaccalaureate certifications and graduate degrees is adding a strong new dimension of maturity to the nursing profession. Graduates of these programs are stepping into their nursing roles with a more developed sense of self and purpose and are making a strong contribution to patient care. Beard would undoubtedly be pleased.

Physical fitness and overall intelligence were also prerequisites for the intelligent selection of students. These requirements have been more or less universally recognized and have not substantially changed throughout history.

Once these prerequisites were met through the selection process, Beard charges nursing educators with the development of the “spirit of nursing.” Among the principles he espouses for “educating the spirit” are :

In this article, Beard concentrates on the criteria to be used in the selection of nursing students and, to a lesser extent, on the qualities that make teachers fine educators of nurses. Many of his later writings clarify his vision of the nature of nursing and justify his exhortation to “educate the spirit” of the nurse. For example, in a speech in 1920, he identifies nursing's role as helping society recognize the worth of human life, conserving human health, and providing for social justice. The crux of Beard's position is his belief in the contributions that educated rather than trained nurses can make to society.

Throughout his life, Beard argued frequently and persuasively for the importance of education and the danger to the health of society in producing nurses simply to staff hospital beds. His writings from 100 years ago carry the seminal arguments and perspectives on nursing education and nursing's role that are just as relevant today. In his day, the term “sub-nurses,” coined by William Mayo, represented the same attitudes expressed today by proponents of shorter education programs. The controversy over associate degree versus baccalaureate preparation as the entry level for nursing, insofar as it represents a dichotomy of technical versus professional education, is the same issue Beard wrote about so frequently and so eloquently. The need to meet demands that results in shortchanging education was anathema to Beard. His flowery, metaphorical writing style is clear in the following sentence referring to this issue: “The stones of technical training have too long been substituted for the bread of teaching.”

Mayo and Beard dueled in public about this issue when Beard wrote a scathing response to Mayo's (1921) article titled “Wanted—100, 000 Girls for Sub-Nurses” in The Pictorial Review, a popular publication. These dueling views about nursing education contain many of the same arguments being used today.

Beard's response in the same magazine several months later, titled “Fair Play for the Trained Nurse” (Beard, 1922b), clearly and wisely articulated the value of higher education for nurses. His insight and wisdom is a beacon we can use to light the path to wisdom about present issues and future challenges.