ABSTRACT
Instruction was adjusted to hospitals’ needs rather than adjusting floor work to instructional needs. Johns Hopkins, for example, kept such a regime until after World War I, and it is not difficult to understand why educational standards were often difficult to maintain. Standards for students inevitably were not very high, since, even if a hospital training school superintendent might have wanted to fail a nursing student, training schools were so subordinate to hospital needs that it was nearly impossible to drop a student who did not want to leave. Student nurses filled almost all positions in the hospital, so that it was not uncommon for schools to graduate students whom the hospital itself would refuse to employ or even to recommend to any employment agency. Part of the difficulty with nursing education was simply that nursing was struggling to be accepted as a profession, but its primary difficulties arose because it was a profession dominated by women.
