Early Male Caregivers and the Long History of Men in Nursing

A profession that keeps “rediscovering” men

Men remain a minority in nursing. In the United States, men made up only 2.7% of registered nurses in 1970 and 9.6% in 2011, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. More recent workforce data suggest that men now account for about 10% to 12% of registered nurses. As noted in an American Association of Colleges of Nursing fact sheet, data from the National Nursing Workforce Survey showed that the proportion of male RNs reached 11.2% in 2022 before adjusting slightly downward to 10.4% in 2024. These numbers explain why male nurses may still be read as exceptions. A patient sees a man in scrubs and assumes he is the physician. A male nursing student notices he is one of only a few men in the classroom. A hospital celebrates men entering nursing as a “new trend.”

Yet the increase of men in modern nursing should not be taken to imply they are newcomers to the profession. Men have been present in nursing’s story since its inception, even when later histories forgot to name them or, arguably, chose to ignore them.

The problem is partly historical language. The modern word “nurse” suggests licensure, registration, scope of practice, and a professional identity shaped by the last 150 years. But nursing work is much older than the title. Long before modern nursing schools, people were washing bodies, preparing food, applying bandages, giving medicines, transporting the injured, watching symptoms, comforting the frightened, and remaining with the dying.

Those workers were called many things: attendants, brothers, monks, orderlies, soldiers, healers, assistants, servants, and lay caregivers. The title was varied. The work was recognizably nursing.

Ancient India and the first recorded male nurses

The nursing record is older than many realize. One of the earliest known examples of formal nursing education comes from ancient India. Historical reviews note that by about 250 BCE, India had a nursing school in which men were the primary, and in some accounts the only, students admitted.

Ancient Indian sources are unusually specific about what bedside care required. Christensen cites the Sutrasthanam (the first section of the foundational Ayurvedic medical text, the Sushruta Samhita), which described the person fit to nurse or attend the bedside as “cool-headed and pleasant,” attentive to the needs of the sick, and disciplined in following instructions. The same tradition expected the attendant to prepare food, bathe, and wash the patient; massage or support the limbs; help the patient move; make and clean beds; prepare drugs; and remain patient with the ill. Later, the Astangahrdayam, attributed to Vagbhata, condensed the ideal attendant’s qualities into four traits: affection or faithfulness toward the patient; cleanliness “in body, mind and speech”; efficiency; and intelligence.

These were not incidental tasks. They were the daily architecture of care. The ancient nurse was not merely a physician’s shadow; he was the person who made treatment livable at the bedside.

Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the overlap of nursing and medicine

The early history of nursing is difficult to separate from the history of medicine. In ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, healing, religion, household labor, military service, and bedside care overlapped. The surviving record often favors physicians, priests, and military leaders, but care required many hands.

In the Hippocratic tradition, male assistants helped carry out treatment and remained with patients. In ancient Rome, military hospitals known as valetudinaria cared for soldiers, and male nurses, called nosocomi, worked in these institutions. Organized care often developed where large numbers of injured bodies had to be managed: wounds cleaned, dressings changed, diet and rest coordinated, symptoms watched.

There were also early Christian caregivers such as the Parabolani, or “persons who risk their lives as nurses,” who transported or attended the sick during periods of epidemic disease. Their work was physically risky and socially difficult.

Monasteries, hospitals, and the religious orders of care

As Christianity expanded, monasteries, hospitals, and religious houses became important sites of organized care. Men were prominent in many of these settings. St. Benedict and St. Alexis appear frequently in histories of male caregiving because their lives became associated with service to the sick, the poor, and the vulnerable.

The Knights Hospitaller, later associated with the Order of Malta, are another important example. Their origins reach back to an 11th-century hospital in Jerusalem that cared for sick and injured pilgrims. The order later became entangled with crusading and military power, but its early identity was also hospital based. Pilgrims needed shelter. Travelers needed food and water. Injured bodies needed washing, dressing, and rest. The Hospitallers remind us that early institutional care did not fit modern

job categories. The same man might be religious brother, military member, porter, attendant, and bedside caregiver. To exclude him from nursing history because he did not hold a modern nursing title is to miss how nursing actually developed.

The Alexian Brothers and plague care

The Alexian Brothers offer one of the clearest examples of men caring in the shadow of epidemic disease. This lay Catholic order became closely associated with care during the Black Death and later outbreaks of plague. They cared for the sick and helped bury the dead at a time when fear of contagion often led communities to abandon those who were ill.

Their work was repetitive and dangerous. It involved the tasks that make nursing both intimate and demanding: cleaning rooms, changing linen, lifting bodies, cooling fevers, feeding the weak, and caring when cure was unlikely. Their care was both spiritual and physical.

St. Camillus de Lellis and reform at the bedside

St. Camillus de Lellis is one of the most frequently cited early male figures in nursing history. Born in 1550, Camillus had been a soldier before becoming a caregiver and reformer. After witnessing the poor treatment of hospital patients, he founded the Ministers of the Sick, now known as the Order of Saint Camillus.

Camillus and his followers became known for attention to the sick poor, the dying, prisoners, and those who were neglected. Historical accounts describe his order as devoted not only to hospital care but also to those too weak or poor to reach an institution. In this sense, his work resembles an early form of home hospice or community nursing.

Camillus is useful to remember because he connects nursing history to discipline, reform, and bedside presence. He was not a registered nurse, because registered nursing did not yet exist. But he insisted that the sick poor were not disposable. He treated care as skilled, organized, compassionate work.

The Reformation, Nightingale, and the feminization of nursing

Men did not disappear from nursing all at once. Their visibility narrowed through several historical shifts. The Protestant Reformation disrupted monasteries, convents, and religious hospitals across parts of Europe. When religious communities were dissolved or driven underground, nursing knowledge, hospital organization, and written records were disrupted. In England, the suppression of Catholic institutions under Henry VIII removed many charitable and hospital structures that had supported organized care.

As hospital care became more secularized, nursing entered a period many historians describe as disorganized and poorly regarded. Men continued to work in military hospitals, psychiatric institutions, wards for men, religious communities, and settings where same-sex intimate care was expected. But their presence became less central to the public story of nursing.

Florence Nightingale transformed that public story. Her 19th-century reforms gave nursing discipline, respectability, sanitation, education, and a powerful social identity. This was an extraordinary achievement and a major opening for women’s professional work. But the Nightingale model also attached the public image of the nurse to respectable womanhood. The modern nurse became imagined as disciplined, moral, educated, and female.

That image elevated nursing. It also narrowed the memory of who had nursed before.

A longer and more inclusive history

Recovering men’s history in nursing is not an argument that men invented nursing or that their contributions were more important than women’s. It is a correction to an incomplete story. Men were present in ancient India, Greek and Roman medical worlds, military hospitals, Christian religious orders, plague care, medieval hospitals, psychiatric institutions, and reform movements.

Some were compassionate. Some worked in harsh and unequal institutions. Some were religious brothers. Some were soldiers. Some were attendants whose names were never recorded. Their history should not be romanticized, but it should be remembered.

Men in nursing are not a modern novelty. They are part of a longer history of bedside labor, institutional care, military service, epidemic response, and religious caregiving. Telling that history makes nursing’s past more complete.

Trae Stewart, PhD, MPH, MSN, MS, PMHNP-BC, is a psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner and researcher. A former Fulbright Specialist, he is a visiting senior lecturer at King’s College London.

(Editor’s note: this is the first post in a four-part series, Men in Nursing: Recovering a Hidden History of Care.)