Happy Nurses Week 2025 5/7/25

It is Nurses’ Week once again.

Funny how that happens.

This is the week that nurses and nursing are being celebrated.

If 2020 was the Year of the Nurse and Midwife that marked 200 years since Florence Nightingale’s birth, then simple math makes this 205th year. You see what I did there.

There have been other notable nurses besides Florence Nightingale. Many, many, many. The nursing theorists whose work guide us. The original nurses who worked to provide us with structure.

Clara Barton and her work on the Civil War battlefield come to mind. As does her star achievement of the American Red Cross.

Dorothea Dix was a contemporary of Clara (can I call her that?) and advocated for mental healthcare of soldiers. She also was concerned with the mentally ill poor people and helped established mental hospitals.

Margaret Sanger who worked as a nurse in the tenements of New York and founded Planned Parenthood. She was also instrumental in the birth control pill development. She, too, was probably sick of women dying in childbirth.

Mary Seacole was a Jamaican-British nurse who was a contemporary of Florence (can I call her that?). She was the first Black woman who authored and published an autobiography in England.

Lilian Wald was a nurse whose passion was for safer living conditions for the poor in New York City. She also started community nursing and was an advocate of nurses in public schools.

Harriet Tubman was a nurse whose concern was for the Black soldiers of the Civil War and the newly freed slaves. She is best known for being a conductor on the Underground Railroad.

This is not a complete list. In fact, this is a living list and being added to constantly.

Giants all of them. Today’s nurses stand on their shoulders and fight many of the same battles. Hygiene might be better. There are better medications and treatments but at the heart, nurses remain the same.

Our reason for professional being are the people who need us. Not just the patients, but the doctors and surgeons and people on the street as well.

I have been a nurse for 24 years and I wouldn’t do anything else.

After all, I have big shoes to fill. My mom, the nurse I want to be when I grow up, is still working after 52 years.