School of Nursing: Connections

Men once dominated the field of nursing

Did you know that, when the first nursing school in the world was started in India in about 250 BC, it included only men? Two hundred years later, St. Benedict founded the Benedictine nursing order and, in 1300, the Alexian Brothers were organized to provide nursing care for victims of the Black Death. For the next 500 years, men dominated nursing and, in 1888, two nursing schools for men were started in New York. But, with the rising interest of women in education and professional careers, the face of nursing began to change. By 1900, delegates to the annual convention of nurses from the U.S. and Canada were exclusively female, and it was 1930 before men were admitted to the American Nurses Association. Men were also excluded from military nursing until after the Korean War, although this field had been predominately male in the past.

After a hundred years as a predominantly female profession, however, nursing is changing again. The number of male students admitted to schools of nursing nationwide increased from less than 1 percent in 1966 to 5 percent in 1996. At the UW School of Nursing, the numbers have been even more impressive, with males comprising 12 percent of applicants admitted to the BSN program in 1998. Elizabeth Soule, the School’s founder, early understood the importance of recruiting more men into nursing and opened nursing programs to men from the beginning.

Roger Parker today at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Roger Noel Parker is one of the many remarkable men who have graduated from the School over the years, obtaining his BSN degree in 1964 and his MN in 1966. He recalls getting his education at a time when his clinical practice instructors "had to screen my patients and obtain each patient’s permission to be cared for by a ‘male nurse.’" He also was the first male student to take all the required courses, including obstetrics and gynecology. "Prior graduates had been given classes and text," Parker recalls, "and then sent to male urology for their clinical practice."

Recruited to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City after graduation, Parker eventually became chairperson of the division of nursing and later obtained a law degree. Today he is Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, where he remains "grateful" for his education at the School, calling it "the foundation for my career."

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