The Munsey Magazine Christmas Cover

# Catalog Description

This December 1910 issue of Munsey's Magazine contains "The Story of the Trained Nurse" by Walter Prichard Eaton, a substantial illustrated essay on professional nursing in America. The piece chronicles nursing's development from Florence Nightingale's reforms during the Crimean War through contemporary practice. Eaton details the founding of America's first nurses' training school at Bellevue Hospital in New York in 1873, initially facing public skepticism about whether respectable women would undertake nursing work. The essay documents nursing's expansion beyond hospitals into private homes, charitable care for the poor, public schools, and municipal health departments. Eaton follows a typical day in the work of Henry Street Settlement nurses on the Lower East Side, describing their treatment of obstetrical cases, pneumonia patients, tuberculosis victims, and chronic cases. By 1909, he notes, forty-seven nurses at Henry Street made over 87,000 visits annually. The piece emphasizes nurses' roles in sanitary education, disease prevention, and civic welfare alongside direct patient care.