Frontier School of Midwifery & Nursing

The evolution of public health care in the US is inextricably tied to what turned out to be the establishment of institutional-based medical-care delivery on one hand, and medical-care delivery controlled and administered by professionals licensed for the purpose and under the state-sanctioned authority of physicians and institutions. This has historically made the position of nurses and the function of nursing problematic from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Throughout the literature of nursing is reflected a presumption that nurses should perform with friendliness, expertise, and compassion according to the expectations of patients and family (Grossman, 1996)--even when those expectations fly in the face of institutional hierarchical arrangements and even though nurses as a group bear much responsibility and little authority (Shindul-Rothschild, Berry, & Long-Middleton, 1996; Cullen, 1995).

Now all of these considerations are or have been at issue in the modern period. Still more were they in the background of the emergence of the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS), which began in 1925 and which was and remains ba

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of their practices" (Gabay & Wolfe, 1997, p. 390). Thus in the background of the seemingly straightforward statement that Breckinridge's service "began training midwives and stimulated the establishment of other midwifery schools" (Breckinridge, 1998, p. 145), was a rather more complex reality. Breckinridge was obliged to either send American Family Nurse recruits (on scholarship) to England for training as nurse-midwives or to recruit British nurse-midwives for service in rural Kentucky. The facts of American medical history were kinder to Breckinridge and midwifery than to institutional maternity praxis and the emerging specialty of obstetrics. In 1931, childbirth statistics revealed that countries with midwife-based obstetrics had lower infant mortality rates than those with physician/hospital-based practice (O'Mara, 1999). That same year, the first formal training school for nurse-midwives was established in New York City (O'Mara, 1999; Gabay & Wolfe, 1997), and many more were created over the course of the decade. One of these schools was in Kentucky, under the auspices of Mary Breckinridge and the FNS: the Frontier Graduate School of Midwifery. The FGSM, established in 1939, was partly a response to the outbreak of World W
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1853
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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