Public Health In The 1930s Essay

The 1930s are mostly known for being the decade of the Great Depression which affected every aspect of life including the medical and health fields. On the public health front malnutrition, overcrowding, poor sanitation and other side effects of the Depression took a huge negative toll on human health. While there were many developments and discoveries in the field of medicine, dramatic improvements to public health were stunted because of extremely poor economic conditions. Fewer people could afford to pay for health care. Hospitals and nursing schools were forced to close due to lack of funding. Although the early 1930s were a time of great technological change and innovation in the field of medicine, it wasn’t able to deliver an upturn to

public health due to the ravaged economy.
The most severe of diseases in the 1930s was polio. Little was known about how the disease was transmitted or how it could be stopped. Vaccines were being developed even though research money was scarce. Along with the outbreak of polio, large increases in death from cancer, respiratory diseases and heart attacks occurred during the Depression. Syphilis was also rampant during this time, affecting nearly 10% of the American population. (U*X*L American Decades, n.d.)
Despite all the despair of the 1930s, there were many major positive developments in the health field. Along with the development of a vaccine for polio and other crippling diseases, new sulfa drugs were being developed and new anesthetics were making surgery safer and less painful. The decade had 2 American Nobel Peace Prize for Medicine winners. Karl Landsteiner won it in 1930 for his discovery and classification of the major blood types. Thomas Hunt Morgan won it in 1933 for his work in genetics in which he shed light on the role chromosomes played in heredity through his research using fruit flies. The most prominent player in the health field in the 1930s was 1932 president elect Franklin Roosevelt. His social reform program, the “New Deal”, provided for medical insurance, child care, help for the disabled and poured government money into public health issues. He also passed the Social Security Act which authorized health grants to states for the investigation of disease. He also created the Civil Works Administration which eventually put 10,000 unemployed nurses to work. (Fitzpatrick, M.L. 1975). Although many advances in medicine were made during the decade, the most important contribution was FDR creating and funding programs to help the nation’s health crisis
Prior to the Depression most nurses sought employment in private duty nursing where the nurse would care for patients in their homes.

A private duty nurse’s duties included bathing and feeding patients, administering medications and dressing wounds. After the Depression started most people could no longer afford this and as a result many nurses were left unemployed. By 1935 however, with all the public health programs started by FDR and all the advances in medicine and technology, there was a great demand for public health nurses. FDR’s programs also allocated money for retraining nurses for the public health field. The role of the public health nurse included patient care along with serving meals, scrubbing floors and cleaning medical equipment. Hours were long and pay was minimal as hospitals tried cutting

costs.
In the January 1930 issue of the American Journal of Nursing (The Nurse and the Public, Volume 30, no.1, page 3), Virginia McCormick protested that since the days of Florence Nightingale the nursing profession was characteristically a “silent profession”. Its ranks were filled with “inherently silent folk.” Consequently, she opined that “now the time for silence is over.” Now (the year her article appeared in 1930) she claimed was the time to break away from the introversion characteristic of the nursing field in order to have a greater, self-assured, intelligent say than in the past. (McCormick, V. 1930, page 3).
In making such an assessment, Virginia, a nurse ‘insider,’ implicitly drew a clear, bleak picture of the state of American Nursing at the beginning of 1930.

In addition, she seemed anxious for the nursing profession to undergo a radical change. She wanted nursing to emerge from its past characteristics of heroic selflessness, long hours on the clock, and virtual anonymity, and transform itself into a far more credible system. This new system would be filled with true professionals protected by legislation, who were capable of having a greater say in the critical care of patients, envisioning greater interaction with the doctoral profession, and achieving greater all-round respect in the health community and with the public overall.

Virginia also provided an insightful glimpse to the possible ‘root cause’ of the dismal state of nursing in the United States in 1930 based on her relevant understanding of the recent history of nursing particularly the previous thirty-five years (apparently beginning approximately 1895). She claimed that:

When the first organizations of nurses appeared in the United States some thirty-five years ago, they were faced with an incredibly difficult task. The sick of the entire nation had to be nursed. There were only a score or more of training schools of high grade and only a few thousand nurses. From these meager beginnings it was their task to spread nursing over the

country.
The burden of expansion rested with these nurses who, to their own more-than-full-time jobs, added the responsibilities of a growing profession. Every particle of work carried by these organizations was carried by nurses who were either on 24-hour duty or were hospital executives on a theoretical 12-hour day which usually stretched itself to the limit. To face the many professional problems in urgent need of solution must have been a difficult task indeed (McCormick, V., 1930, page 4).
Thus, it would seem, there were various critical changes that were needed in so many areas of the nursing field:
1. The ratio between the amount of sick patients in the U.S. against the amount of available nurses, demanded that the nursing field somehow multiply its ranks at a far quicker pace than the rate of expansion that was common in between the turn of the 20th century through 1930.
2. The number of hours typically worked by nurses during that period was herculean, and thus capable of substantially weakening a nurses own bodily defense and thus potentially shortening her life, due to the strain of the immense number of hours worked. This meant that possible legislation needed to be passed in order to protect nurses during that period,
3. The number of “high grade” learning institutions (or schools of high quality) also needed to multiply at a far faster pace as well to meet the forecasted need for nurses during that era, encompassing the turn of the century through at least the 1930’s.
As regards to legislation that needed to be drafted and passed within each of the states, Virginia indicated that it was only “now”(during the approximate period beginning 1930) that Nurses were being given an increasing role to meet with, and thus enlighten the various state legislators on the shortcomings and needs within the nursing field, so that legislation could be passed to begin addressing many of those needs. Part of that impetus also entailed conveying the nurses “story” to the public, so that the public itself could also emerge as a powerful avenue to sway legislators to create the needed legislation that could help transform the industry as Virginia McCormick had hoped would happen (McCormick, V.,1930 page 4).
Another area that Virginia McCormick had hoped that the “Nurses story” (which was just beginning to be conveyed to the public in 1930), could drastically change, was the public perception of what Nursing was truly about. She was concerned that the public perception of Nursing in general was limited to sentimentality, whereby nurses were perceived in the “tender” and “cherished” sense of someone who merely ministered altruistically to suffering humanity, all the while being impervious to the reality that Nursing had already made great strides, with the promise of making even greater strides in achieving the level of a truly complex and scientific profession (McCormick, V., 1930, page 5).
True to Virginia’s prophecy and assessment of great strides within nursing, during the 1930s, the Nursing profession did indeed show promise as a scientific profession, even to the extent of inventing new therapeutic techniques that, at the time, seemed to buck conventional medical practice. In 1929 in Australia, Elizabeth Kenny, an unaccredited nurse, began caring for a young patient who was afflicted with poliomyelitis. Rather than attempt rehabilitation using the conventional standard of immobilizing the patient’s legs, Kenny began applying her own instinctive methods, of what is now considered the forerunner of Physical therapy, and applied regular and constant physical stimulation to the legs of her young patient. Within 18 months, the patient seemed virtually completely rehabilitated from the disease (Rogers 2013). By 1937, Kenny established several clinics in several cities in Australia where she continued her revolutionary therapy with great success.
Thus, the 1930s seemed to express itself as a critical period to the field of nursing. It was critical in the sense that, it was the period nursing began leaving behind former questionable public perceptions. Across the globe nurses were expressing their voices with greater frequency, challenging legislators to do more to transform the industry, and challenging the current system of conventional treatment while introducing newer, revolutionary treatments that offered greater promise. The 1930s was perhaps the actual door that ushered in modern Nursing theory and practice, as the true science we know it to be today.