Order of Nursing

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Vincentian women with their characteristic hoods are among the best-known nursing communities

As a nursing order are religious and orden similar communities especially the Roman Catholic Church called whose members especially the nursing dedicated and caring for patients.

History and background

According to the Regula Benedicti , the sick were already considered members of the body of Christ , to whom special attention and care was given in monastic life . Nursing developed into a separate service in the monasteries and was increasingly given institutional status, with physical care ( cura corporis ) for sick and old people having the same importance as pastoral care ( cura animae ). In the monasteries there were hospital wards , pharmacies and sick kitchens which, besides monks, were often run by lay brothers and which also benefited patients outside the monastery.

Monastic and secular hospital fraternities ( hospitaliters ) who worked in pilgrims' hospitals , infirmaries or leprosories joined together to form orders that are historically referred to as hospital orders and partly belong to the nursing orders that still exist today or to which to this day important welfare organizations such as Johanniter-Unfall- Help or Malteser Relief Service go back. Well-known medieval hospital orders include the Order of Antoniter (1095), the Order of St. John (1099), the Order of the Holy Spirit (1170) and the Order of Lazarus (1198). In the context of the Crusades, some hospital orders were transformed into spiritual knightly orders , including the Knights of St. John and the Teutonic Order .

From the canons , hospital brotherhoods , mendicant orders and related third orders , beguines and begarden communities , new nursing orders such as Jesuats (1360), Alexians (1468), hospital brothers of John of God (1571) or Camillians (1582) emerged who lived according to the Augustine Rule and ran hospitals and looked after the sick, those in need of care or disabled people .

Female monastery communities were unable to pursue the ideal of vita activa (“active life”) outside of the monastery for a long time, or only with difficulty , because of the mandatory enclosure for nuns . Nevertheless, there were important models such as St. Elisabeth of Thuringia , who lived with other women in the hospital she founded and who later gave birth to nursing orders such as the Elisabethinnen (1622) and other Franciscan nuns . St. Vinzenz von Paul (1576–1660) founded together with Luise von Marillac in 1634 the cooperative of the daughters of Christian love of St. Vincent von Paul ("Vinzentinerinnen"), the largest and most famous nursing order of modern times and the first society of apostolic life in the Catholic Church . The Borromean Sisters were founded in Nancy on June 18, 1652 with the support of Emanuel Chauvenel.

Especially in the 19th century created many new, predominantly female congregations whose main task was to nursing, including Gray Sisters (1842) and more than Sisters of Mercy called communities of nuns . Several orders of brothers established in the 19th century are also active in the nursing sector, known are the Brothers of Mercy from Maria Hilf and the Brothers of Mercy from Montabaur . Due to the expansion of the hospital system and the growing need for qualified nursing staff, the Catholic women's congregations developed the care of sick people into their central field of work in the 19th century. They made a decisive contribution to the design of inpatient nursing . The municipalities supported the work of the religious women's communities. Just like the comparable Protestant deaconesses , the Catholic women's congregations also succeeded in Germany in expanding their position in the care sector more and more in the course of the 19th century because they were able to provide very well qualified and at the same time inexpensive staff in large numbers. Borromean and Vincentian women had a great influence on nursing in Prussia . During the Kulturkampf , all Catholic religious orders were banned in Prussia, with the exception of the pure nursing orders.

In Switzerland , too, in the course of the 19th century, socially active sister communities emerged on both the Catholic and Protestant sides, after the welfare and hospital system that had been built up by monasteries since the High Middle Ages suffered a collapse as a result of the Reformation . Hospital nurses were initially sent to Switzerland from foreign parent companies, primarily from France . The most important foundations of female congregations in Switzerland were the mother houses in Baldegg (1830), Menzingen (1844), Ingenbohl (1856), Cham (1865) and Ilanz (1865), which were involved in the hospital sector and in the field of education. As in other countries, the emergence of these women's institutes was primarily initiated and shaped by male founding figures, on the Catholic side especially the Capuchin Theodosius Florentini , who founded the two most important Swiss congregations of the Menzing and Ingenbohl Sisters and based himself on the model of the Sisters of Divine Providence from Ribeauvillé oriented in Alsace. The social and charitable work of the religious had a denominational charisma and served to consolidate the Catholic milieu , as the sisters were perceived as reliable representatives of practiced Catholicism in both traditional Catholic and diaspora areas .

The motherhouse system developed in the female nursing orders proved to be an effective, competing public model of nursing staff education and management, which has long been superior to the organizational form of religious nursing communities . Young girls, mostly from rural areas, for whom religious life in an active community was attractive, not least because of the high social security offered by the sisters' congregations, were trained together in the mother house to provide general education and nursing and then assigned to the hospitals centrally by the mother house. Thanks to the internal exchange and solidarity of the sisters, the transfer of knowledge and the level of training were higher than that of independent nurses, and the strong position of the mother houses vis-à-vis municipalities and hospital operators contributed to the influence of the orders and the reputation of the sisters, whose services were socially recognized and honored. However, in the daily work of hospital directors, doctors, monastery rectors and superiors little consideration was given to the personal needs of the sisters and in many cases there was a heavy work overload and unprotected exposure to the risk of infection with serious health consequences, which led to an increased mortality of Catholic nurses compared to the total population.

The motherhouse model was also used by communities that had specialized in elderly care or other nursing and social tasks, such as school sisters . It was also adopted by numerous secular organizations such as the Red Cross or municipal bodies, determined nursing in Germany until the First World War and lasted until the middle of the 20th century. Of a total of 90,000 German religious women, around 35,000 (almost 39 percent) worked as nurses in 1969 . In 2011, a total of 1,370 women religious were employed as nurses in hospitals, nursing services or care facilities in Germany, which is 6.3 percent of all women religious; 7 percent are allotted to care professions. In 2018, there were still 264 Roman Catholic religious (women and men) working in the health sector in Austria , which is around 5 percent.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Order of Nursing. In: Duden online , according to DWDS, listed in GWDS 1999; Accessed March 2019.
  2. ^ Heinrich Schipperges : Illness . In: Lexicon of the Middle Ages (LexMA). Volume 5, Artemis & Winkler, Munich / Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-7608-8905-0 , Sp. 1473 f.
  3. ↑ Hospitaller . In: Lexicon of the Middle Ages (LexMA). Volume 5, Artemis & Winkler, Munich / Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-7608-8905-0 , Sp. 137.
  4. ↑ Cf. for example Christian Tenner: Die Ritterordensspitäler in southern Germany (Ballei Franken). A contribution to the earliest healthcare. Mathematical and scientific dissertation, LMU Munich 1969.
  5. ↑ Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy of St. Charles Borromeo. Profile on the website of the Archdiocese of Cologne , accessed in March 2019.
  6. ↑ Relinde Meiwes: Catholic nursing congregations and nursing in the 19th century. In: Ute Gerhard , Karin Hausen (eds.): Sich Sorge - Care (= L'Homme 19 (2008), issue 1). Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 2008, pp. 39–60 (here: p. 41).
  7. ↑ Relinde Meiwes: Catholic nursing congregations and nursing in the 19th century. Cologne 2008, p. 45.
  8. ↑ Relinde Meiwes: Catholic nursing congregations and nursing in the 19th century. Cologne 2008, p. 51.
  9. ↑ Relinde Meiwes: Catholic nursing congregations and nursing in the 19th century. Cologne 2008, p. 46.
  10. ↑ Relinde Meiwes: Catholic nursing congregations and nursing in the 19th century. Cologne 2008, p. 53.
  11. ↑ Relinde Meiwes: Catholic nursing congregations and nursing in the 19th century. Cologne 2008, p. 52.
  12. ↑ Birgitta Negel-Täuber: The founder of the "love sisters". Pauline von Mallinckrodt died on April 30, 1881. In: Katholisch.de , June 3, 2017, accessed March 2019.
  13. ↑ Esther Vorburger-Bossart: Sisters of the Order in Eastern Switzerland in the 20th Century. Theological Publishing House Zurich, Zurich 2018, ISBN 978-3-290-18143-7 , pp. 9-11.
  14. ↑ Esther Vorburger-Bossart: Sisters of the Order in Eastern Switzerland in the 20th Century. Zurich 2018, pp. 23–25.
  15. ^ Philipp Herder-Dorneich , Werner Kötz: To the service economy. System analysis and system criticism of the hospital care services. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-02775-2 , pp. 99-103.
  16. ↑ Relinde Meiwes: Catholic nursing congregations and nursing in the 19th century. Cologne 2008, pp. 53–55.
  17. ↑ Heidi Oschmiansky: Between Professionalization and Precarization: Elderly Care in the Welfare State Change in Germany and Sweden (PDF; 3.7 MB). Online publication (Diss. FUB ), Berlin 2013, p. 121.
  18. ↑ Nuns still in 2000? In: Der Spiegel 40/1969 (September 30, 1969), p. 49f.
  19. ↑ Order of women in Germany. Notification of fowid of 1 March 2017 fetched in March of 2019.
  20. ↑ religious communities in Austria, 2018 notification of fowid of 27 March 2019 called up in March 2020th