Eternal Night - Traces of Light in the History of Human Nursing

(I) Candle in the Darkroom: From Sordid Profession to Sacred Vocation

On a rainy night in the slums of London in 1853, Florence Nightingale's carriage rolled through sewage-strewn streets. Nursing was considered “the livelihood of prostitutes and drunkards” when the aristocratic lady was on her knees scrubbing the bodies of laborers in a cholera-ridden makeshift ward. The statistical notebook she carried with her recorded the grim reality that the mortality rate for amputations in field hospitals was 80%, and the main reason for this was the lack of post-operative care.

At Barak Hospital in the Crimea, Nightingale's “Ring Ward”, which for the first time extended bed spacing to 1.2 meters, was a simple reform based on the perception of contagion that, together with her invention of the patient call bell system, reduced the mortality rate of wounded soldiers from 42% to 2%. More profoundly, she injected scientific dignity into nursing - the brass lamp that patrolled the wards not only illuminated late-night corridors, but also dispelled millennia of prejudice against nursing.

What is less well known is that at the Panama Canal site at almost the same time, Mary Seacole, a black nurse, set up a field hospital at her own expense, using herbal remedies to treat yellow fever patients. The forgotten nursing pioneer wrote in her memoirs, “When all the doctors refused to touch the fevered patients, my apron was the isolation gown.” The sparks ignited by the two women on different continents eventually converged to form the founding declaration of the International Council of Nurses in 1912, “Nursing is not servant labor, but a profession requiring intelligence and character.”

(II) Beneath the Wings of Steel: the Invisible Spine of the Modern Healthcare System

The figure of Nurse Natasha is always blurred into clumps on the x-ray films of the Siege of Stalingrad in 1942 - because she insisted on not wearing a lead apron, giving up her only protective gear to her patients. This choice allowed her to die of radiation sickness at the age of 28, but won surgery for 386 soldiers. This spiritual code of near-martyrdom is engraved in different forms in the nursing epics of every era.

At the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Memorial Museum, nurse Ayako Takahashi's pocket watch is on display, with the hands permanently stopped at 8:15. The 23-year-old midwife shielded her newborn with her body at the moment of the nuclear blast, the hot, molten case welded to the school emblem on her spine. And at the site of the World Trade Center in New York, one finds the badge of emergency nurse Erin, inscribed with the record of her life that she held on to to the very end: “9:03 p.m. Established intravenous access for the 19th casualty.”

The sacrifices of contemporary nursing are even more silent and prolonged. Research at Peking Union Medical College Hospital shows that ICU nurses need to complete 436 operational actions per shift, with nerve tension exceeding that of air traffic controllers. In oncology wards, the average annual exposure of nurses to cytotoxic drugs is equivalent to 120 years of exposure in the general population. Those chromosomes eroded by chemotherapeutic drugs, those due to frequent decontamination chapped hands, constitutes the invisible cost of the miracle of modern medicine.

(III) Darkest Hour: The Ark of Life in the New Crown Pandemic

On January 24, 2020, surveillance video from the Jingyintan Hospital in Wuhan recorded a scene in which nurses wearing Level 3 protection pushed hospital beds and ran wildly down a corridor, and the fog on the face screen frosted and melted as they gasped violently. This is the saddest march in the history of human nursing - 42,600 nurses in 72 hours to complete the assembly, an average of 11.6 hours of continuous work per person in order to save the protective clothing, pressure sores on the bridge of the nose to become a special medal.

In Wuchang Square Pod Hospital, nurse Lin Ting invented the “Breathing Exercise Game”, which allows patients with mild illnesses to wear finger pulse oximeters to compete in blood oxygen elevation. This idea, full of black humor, has reduced the incidence of anxiety in the ward by 67%. On the back of the protective suit of Chen Lu, a nurse from Shanghai, there is a cartoon temperature chart that changes daily: from a frustrated bear at 39.5℃ to a cheering gesture at 36.8℃, these childish graffiti have become the warmest language of diagnosis and treatment in the intensive care ward.

Across the Atlantic, at Elmhurst Hospital in New York, head nurse Maria insisted on posthumous care for every deceased person when body bags were in short supply." The last thing they perceive should be the warmth of a human being, not the coldness of a shroud." This insistence on the dignity of life echoes the history of nurses soothing dying patients with operatic chants during the 1918 pandemic.

(D) The Sequel of Light: When Lamplight Meets the Future

At Stanford Medical Center today, the nursing robot "Grace" can accurately perform venipuncture, but the developers insist on preserving the nursing code of the Florence Nightingale era: the patient's name must be spoken before each operation. This adherence to technological ethics is similar to the University of Tokyo Hospital's tradition of keeping handwritten temperature slips in its electronic medical record system - those faintly trembling inkstrokes hide a sense of life that AI can never replicate.

From the convent nurses who burned themselves to protect their villages during the Black Death, to the aviation nursing specialists who monitor the vital signs of astronauts in today's space stations; from the vaccine incubators on horseback in the mountains of Yunnan, to the custodial relays in cross-country organ transshipment, the spirit of nursing has always been passed down through fission. As the theme of the 2023 International Conference of Nurses, "Voices of Nursing Shape a Healthy Planet," this lamp, which has traveled through two centuries, is illuminating the more complex dilemmas of modernity: long-term care in an aging society, flexible interventions in mental health, and ethical restructuring of end-of-life care. ......

As we place flowers in front of the Florence Nightingale statue in May, it might be better to remember the Boston nurses' strike. Perhaps it's even more important to remember the sign held up during the Boston nurses' strike: “We don't need hero titles, we need safe nurse-patient ratios.” Those hands wrinkled in sweat under protective clothing, those conditioned reflexes formed in the midst of monitor alarms, and those regrets of missing the last face of a family member forever remind us that the best tribute is for the light bearers to not have to be fueled by flesh and blood, but instead to be truly guarded and nourished by the system.