ABSTRACT
Nursing reform within any country is influenced both by what has been done in other countries and by independent reform movements within the country itself. Florence Nightingale, for example, had studied the nursing done by various Catholic orders and by the Kaiserswerth deaconesses, but her reforms depended to a great extent on an English tradition of long standing. The society continued to give training in home nursing throughout the nineteenth century, but not until 1897 was the course extended to a full year. The Lutheran counterpart of Muhlenberg was the Reverend William Alfred Passavant who introduced the Kaiserswerth deacon-ess order into Pittsburgh in 1849. The New York hospital had been a project on which Blackwell had worked for several years; she officially inaugurated it in December 1855 with an “Address on the Medical Education of Women,” in which she tried to show that medicine was a work in which women had always been engaged.
