Nurse in 1633: The Daughters of Charity leave the cloister

Healthcare's largest profession: from Scutari's lamp to the ICU monitor, the person who is still at the bedside when everyone else has gone home. Nursing is the largest profession in healthcare — roughly 29.8 million people worldwide by the WHO's 2023 count, around half of the entire global health workforce. It is also the profession the public trusts most: Gallup's US poll has ranked nurses first for honesty and ethics every year but one since 1999. Yet for most of its history the work had no name, no training and no pay, because caring for the sick was simply assumed to be women's unpaid duty.

The modern profession was invented remarkably recently, and traceably: a German pastor's training institute at Kaiserswerth in 1836, Florence Nightingale's reformed war hospital at Scutari in 1854, her secular training school at St Thomas' Hospital in London in 1860, and New Zealand's world-first registration law in 1901. Within two generations, a job done by untrained hired watchers became a licensed profession with schools, examinations, registers and an international council of its own.

This page follows that arc from the deaconesses of the early church and the nursing tent of Rufaida Al-Aslamia in seventh-century Medina to today's intensive-care units and nurse practitioners. It covers how people actually become nurses in different countries, what a twelve-hour shift really contains, the craft knowledge nurses pass to each other, who reached the top of the profession, and how much of the work machines can realistically absorb.