ABSTRACT
The International Council of Nurses (ICN), established in 1904 with great expectations, had been rendered inoperative by World War I. Indirectly nurses were allowed to participate through the League of Red Cross Societies (LORCS), founded in 1920, but the most valuable contribution of the LORCS to nursing was the establishment of a course in public health nursing at London University. The major accomplishment of the ICN in this interwar period was to establish the Florence Nightingale International Foundation as an endowed trust within the ICN. Nurses were made part of the committees, conferences, and medical teams being organized as projects to be sent throughout the world. African nursing shares many of the same problems as nursing in the Middle East, but the problems are compounded because in many of the newly independent countries the old colonial administration did little to advance indigenous nursing.
