NURSING

by Lillian D. Wald Encyclopdia Britannica's editors first treated the subject of nursing as a stand-alone topic in the Ninth Edition (1875-89), some 15 years after Florence Nightingale had established the first school of nursing, the Nightingale School for Nurses, in London. In the Ninth and Tenth (190203) editions, the article was unsigned and probably compiled by the editors. For the Twelfth Edition (1922), the Scottish social-welfare worker and writer Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane discussed the nursing profession in the United Kingdom; the remainder of the article was signed (X.), a designation that signified anonymous authorship. It is worth noting that the entire article on Nursing took up not quite three pages, while Nomography--methods of graphic calculation--covered nearly six. In 1926, the year of publication of the Thirteenth Edition, Haldane's article had been replaced with a piece by Emily E. MacManus, matron of the Royal Infirmary, Bristol, and Lillian D. Wald had been enlisted to write about the profession of nursing in the United States. By this time Wald, who had been active in the field of nursing since the mid-1890s, had in effect established the profession of public health nursing. Nursing in the U.S.