Male nurse action figure/ gcfairch, flickr

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN editor-in-chief

Men have served in nursing roles since at least the third century, when a special order of men was said to have existed to care for plague victims in Alexandria. And various religious orders seem to have had groups of men devoted to nursing tasks during the Middle Ages.

More recently, a number of men served as nurses or in nursing roles during the U.S. Civil War—Walt Whitman, who extensively visited wounded soldiers during the Civil War, has sometimes been described as one, though he mostly focused on tasks like writing letters for illiterate soldiers, bringing them special foods and necessary items, and providing companionship. (See our article on Whitman from our 100th anniversary issue of October, 2000.)

There were schools of nursing for men since the early 1900s. Last year, we published “My Grandfather’s Unpublished Manuscript” (August, 2012), a wonderful story of how the author (a nurse) found an article describing her grandfather’s experiences during his education and nursing career, which began with graduation from nursing school in 1929.

There were several early articles about male nurses in AJN—the oldest one I found was from March, 1924: “A School of Nursing for Men,” by Kenneth T. Crummer, described the school of nursing for men at the Pennsylvania Hospital and its founding 10 years earlier, in 1914. The final sentence reads, “Who knows […]