New Testament Deaconess Phoebe : An Integral Part Of Faith

Before the existence of the Great War, America had fought in previous wars. In the years before the Great War nursing was not even a word for the women who had helped with the aid of fallen soldiers. Florence Nightingale, who helped in establishing nursing as a career used her efforts in organizing an emergency nursing service (Dahlman 2). Nightingale started off at first with forty women, some of whom were Sisters of Religious Nursing Orders and others hospital-taught women of the old school, not trained in the modern way, but experienced (Dahlman 3). Florence Nightingale founded the Nightingale Training School for Nurses at St. Thomas’ Hospital which was the parent of the modern system of nursing. From her, therefore, we may well date the story of nursing service of the American Red Cross (Dahlman 4).

Nightingale, F. (1860).Notes on nursing: what it is and what it is not. New York:D.Appleton And Company.

The nursing profession became a recognized vocational during the crusades (1100 to 1200). Criminals, widows, and orphans were recruited to take care of the sick in exchange for housing and food. Health care conditions became extremely bad. In the mid 1800s Florence Nightingale a woman who studied in Germany with a Protestant order of woman who cared for the sick lowered the death rate from 60% to 1%. She train a group of woman to care for the sick and wounded. She believed that cleaning up the environment and providing ventilation and sanitation and proper nutrition will decrease the death rate which she succeeded. Florence Nightingale kept records and statistics that reinforced her believes of care. Many

The incidence which is mostly remembered in reference to the services of Florence Nightingale is the leadership of Florence Nightingale after the war, after her death her biographers called her “lady with the lamp”. The readings on Florence Nightingale will depict that she was a great social activist. She was continuously involved in the services to help and nurture mankind. She possessed a heart of an angel. Nightingales activities were related to her belief that one should try to help humanity in order to be near to the God. She really loved her God and all her writings were related to this topic. As stated by Nightingale "It is not, God will not punish, we shall therefore not surely die. It is, God loves us, and therefore why will we die? One says that God is careless, the other that He is loving." In an unpublished sermon she insisted on God's "real personal interest in our welfare," not just His "mercy generally." It was hard to believe this, she acknowledged, "But if this belief once takes possession of our hearts, then are we redeemed indeed."

From this moment on, the quality of patient care was improved. The governing board of the hospital was not always pleased with the decisions that were made by Nightingale. She taught and guided her uneducated nurses with the information that was needed (Christensen 3). During the Crimean War there were a large number of deaths and harsh conditions suffered by the wounded soldiers. After Nightingale found out, she sent a letter stating that she wanted to offer her services to assist. Her services turned around the way nursing was at Barrack Hospital. The units were cleaned, clothes were washed often and sanitary settings were established. Soldiers began to respect her and looked forward to see her. At night while she made her rounds, she would carry a lamp to light her way. She was very soon known as “Lady with the Lamp”; this lamp became her trademark (Christensen 3).

In the world today nursing plays a major role that often associates with Civil War women, due to the fame of Clara Barton. Clara later founded “the American Red Cross in 1881.” Unlike other nurses she went out to the battlefield to nurse the soldier where they have fallen. With that courageous act she became known at the “Angel of the Battlefield.” Clara was a courageous

Florence Nightingale, born in 1820, revolutionized nursing as it is today. Throughout her time working with the wounded soldiers during the Crimean War, she noted that more soldiers were dying of infections than from wounds. Therefore, she worked to ensure sanitation as well as sufficient health and healing practices amongst her patients. From care to prevention, Nightingale’s practices were able to set the foundation for nurses today. Nightingale distinguished that a healthy environment is essential to one’s health and thus her tenets of ventilation, cleanliness, light, as well as nutrition set the bases of the City of Toronto’s tuberculosis program for the under-housed, homeless, and the correctional population.

The early church took on the task of caring for and visiting the sick. A very important part of the church’s ministry from the beginning, has been healing and spiritual counseling. Parish Nursing began with the early work of deaconesses and other religious sisters who worked in parishes to provide whole person health promotion with an emphasis on spiritual care. The contemporary side of Parish Nursing was conceptualized by Reverend Granger Westberg as a result of his work with Holistic Health Centers in the 1970 's. In 1984 Reverend Westberg approached Lutheran General Health System, Park Ridge, Illinois, with the idea of partnering with local congregations in a parish nurse project (Vukelich, 2002). Today, the United States, Canada and many other parts of the world have Parish Nurses that are serving in the faith communities.

When one hears the name, Florence Nightingale, the word nurse is instantly paired with it because of her contributions to nursing. Florence Nightingale became a national heroine after nursing the British troops at Scutari in the Crimean War during 1854-56 and became a pioneer for nursing using sanitary and administrative techniques. According to editor, Lynn McDonald, in Florence Nightingale- An Introduction to Her Life and Family: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, Vol. 1, “Nightingale’s work on the foundation of nursing was a life-long preoccupation, but it was a part of a broader concern to reform public healthcare, prevent disease, and promote health” (84). However, many historians believe her ignorance of sanitation caused the death toll at Scutari to rise.

Florence Nightingale, or as soldiers on the battlefield would call her the “Lady with the Lamp”, was an inspirational women of the nineteenth century that had many aspirations and dreams concerning the care of others. Achieving these dreams by “facilitating the reparative processes of the body by manipulating the patient’s environment” (Potter & Perry 2009, p. 45); Nightingale laid the foundations of modern nursing and gave the country and many others a system that has stood the test and remains timeless. In this, Florence has become one of the most widely known nursing theorist to this day.

The role of Phoebe in the early Christian Church has been long debated. Due to the Apostle Paul’s terminology in Rom. 16:2, some scholars have gathered Phoebe to be a deaconess. Their findings, however, are based on mistranslation of the Greek time era for which the word deaconess came into existence. The word deaconess was not created within the Greek language until the third to fourth century and was used to describe females who functioned with much less authority than first-century male diaconates. Those who have tried to discredit the authority of Phoebe in the early Church have been doing so by explaining that original biblical text entitles her a deaconess, as defined in the third to fourth century. Those who have under-qualified

The earliest nurses never attended nursing school; they were often nuns or other women who provided care for the sick, poor, or homeless without family support (The history of Nursing, 2017). During the 18th and 19th centuries, the nursing profession expanded to include care of soldiers during many prominent wars (The History of Nursing, 2017). Florence Nightingale was a nurse during the Crimean War. The conditions she found soldiers in were deplorable. At this time she found that keeping these soldiers clean would lead to healing. She also began tending to them at all hours of the day. Upon her return to England, she wrote a report on her findings that helped reform health care. Years later, she started the Nightingale School for Nurses. After this several nursing schools began in the United States and were all founded on Nightingale’s ideas. The Civil War gave enormous impetus to the building of hospitals and to the development of nursing as a credentialed profession (Weathorford, 2010). One of the pioneers during this time was Clara Barton. By serving during the war she understood the need for clothing, food and shelter. She developed The Red Cross to be a program to aid those affected by

The 19th century marked the beginning of professional nursing. Florence Nightingale was the legend behind it as she began the struggle of nurses being recognized as professionals. It is hard to believe that nurses were once assigned to the job as a sentence for crimes committed or for the women who were too old or sick to hold conventional jobs. Nightingale’s focus included infection control, documentation, patient safety, confidentiality, and evidence based practice, which seems common place today, but was very forward thinking for that period. The era of Florence Nightingale is just the beginning of the timeline of significant events and

Florence Nightingale, a well-educated nurse, was recruited along with 38 other nurses for service in a hospital called Scutari during the Crimean War in 1854 . It was Nightingale's approaches to nursing that produced amazing results. Florence Nightingale was responsible for crucial changes in hospital protocol, a new view on the capabilities and potential of women, and the creation of a model of standards that all future nurses could aspire towards.

As a young woman, Nightingale often accompanied her mother when she visited the sick. This inspired her to want to be a nurse, and against her parents’ wishes she entered a nurses’ training program. During the Crimean war she was asked by a family friend to come and care for the British soldiers at the army hospital. While there she witnessed filth, vermin, and death. Upon seeing the unsanitary conditions and the health risk to the soldiers she began her crusade to establish an environment that would promote health and healing. Thus: The Environmental Theory.