Nurse

The Rise & Fall of “Care”

NURSE: n.  a person who cares for the sick or infirm

First appearing in English in the thirteenth century, nurse identified “a woman who nourishes or suckles an infant.” It could also mean “foster mother of a young child.” Having come into the language from French bearing the very same meanings, it traces its origin to the Latin nutrix, “wet nurse.”

From Feeding to Caretaking

By the fifteenth century, it had generalized to mean “one who protects nurtures, trains, or cherishes.” Two centuries later, in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors,the following appears: “I will attend my husband, be his nurse, Diet his sickness, for it is my Office” (V.i.99). For the first time, nurse was used to indicate a “person who takes care of a sick or infirm person or persons.”

Outside of home and family, such care has not always existed. Prior to the advent of Christianity, Greco-Roman healers prescribed remedies but offered little else. Neither compassion nor regard for the dignity of all played any significant role in the empire. According to Dionysius of Alexandria, the pagans “thrust aside anyone who began to be sick . . . cast the sufferers out upon the public roads half dead . . . and treated them with utter contempt.” Christians, however, cared for the suffering out of compassion born of their regard for every human as created in the image of God. From saving abandoned infants to caring for the sick and dying (including unbelievers) during the Antonine Plague, believers regarded their compassionate response as an offering to God.

Only as Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire did Europe see the kind of care we today associate with nursing. Subsequent to the Council of Nicaea (AD 325), bishops directed Christians to build hospitals in every cathedral town. The caregivers might include a trained physician, but the majority consisted of deaconesses, widows, and eventually monks and nuns, dedicated to obeying Christ’s command to care for the suffering.

From Religious to Secular

As has happened with a broad spectrum of practices and attitudes born of Christianity, people beholden to secular philosophies began to regard these beneficent works as somehow expected. And as materialism supplanted theistic thought in academia, the expectations began to be institutionalized.

In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt first proposed health care as a human right during his State of the Union Address. Soon after, the World Health Organization declared “the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being.” These assertions mark a sharp departure from the premise in the Declaration of Independence that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” and that the role of government is to “secure these rights,” not to create or confer them (emphasis added). Nonetheless, what once was offered as sacrificial service in the name of Christ has become something certain governing authorities take it upon themselves to provide, and certain people expect as a “right” to be enacted and provided by the state.

From Care to Disregard

This does not bode well. Christianity’s worldview brought down an empire but built a civilization that merged the best of the classical world with the heritage established by the Creator. Now, as authoritarians recast religious service into bureaucratic agencies they alone manage, we see a creeping resurgence of the cruel disregard which prevailed two millennia ago for unwanted children, unproductive invalids, and the sick and dying. To the extent that we look to the state for “care,” our posterity may find that, outside of home and family, true caretaking will become more and more rare.