Public Health Nursing

“Ironically, at a time when public-health medicine was increasingly seen as the backwater of the medical profession, public-health nurses, because their practice involved autonomy from medical and hospital control and the provision of cross-class care and education, were perceived as the elite in nursing. At the same time, public health remained the smallest of nursing’s practice fields” (Reverby, 110). This kind of nursing grew slowly because it required an endowed charity large enough to support the nurse’s entire salary, but after 1900, with increased immigration and government concern with health, “both voluntary and government-supported public-health agencies began to grow” (109).