A road not taken: the proposal for a Harvard School of Nursing

WARD F. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17 : 128–141
A road not taken: the proposal for a Harvard School of Nursing The modernist orientation of nurse leaders in the late nineteenth century directly impacted the future of nursing in the USA. Their orientation is explored in this article as a factor that may have contributed to the failure of the Harvard School of Nursing proposal – a road not taken in nursing education, a road that would have afforded nursing an early central role within the Harvardization of American post‐secondary education. The backlash resulting from the attention that was given to Alfred Worcester and Annette Fiske’s radical call for contextualization is explored. Modernist tropes of thought that enabled early nurse leaders to weld nursing education to hospitals through the actions of nursing superintendents are described. Outcomes resulting from this welding are delineated, including idolatry of the hospital as nursing’s icon, subservience to physicians, a monastic on‐duty mantra, the development of a standardized curriculum linked to hospitals, and the framing of state registration within a philosophy that disenfranchised nurses. A non‐teleological, narrative analysis of this case is offered to enable nursing to heighten the tensions between the tropes of modernism and those of contextualism, and thus, to empower leaders in the re‐invention of America’s twenty‐first century healthcare delivery system.