Celebrating nursing’s rich history this week on Nursing Notes Live with Arlene Keeling, Ph.D., RN, FAAN, the “Centennial Distinguished Professor of Nursing” at the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing History at the University of Virginia. Every nurse should have a solid basis in the history of our profession. Here’s that interview looking at the history of nursing.

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Jamie Davis:         Arlene, welcome to Nursing Notes Live. It’s great to have you show. I always ask our nurses a traditional first question and that first question is why did you want to become a nurse?

Arlene Keeling:  Well, I grew up in the 1960s and there was a television show on – two of them actually, Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey – that I watched religiously as a young girl. I was fascinated by the scientific terminology, the high-tech care they provided in hospitals and wondered what things were – like what was subdural hematoma or an epidural hematoma – and then I became a candy-striper at a local hospital and decided that I was in love with nursing. The nurses are the ones who were at the bedside. One incident I remember vividly was them turning a Stryker frame for a spinal cord-injured patient and being fascinated by all that the nurses did.

Jamie:                   We are so involved in so many of the direct patient care aspects of healthcare that you’re hard-pressed to find someone that’s had a healthcare experience that hasn’t been touched by a nurse in some way.

Arlene:                 Well, that’s true. As a child, I had had severe kidney disease after a strep throat infection. I was very impressed with the nurse who gave me the penicillin injections and the sulfa medicine. I probably realized that she was saving my life.

Jamie:                   Now you’re a professor of nursing now at the University of Virginia. Tell us a little bit about what led you through your career path to where you are today because we get a lot of people, especially student nurses and people interested in nursing careers, that ask us about how people define or find their nursing specialty or find their nursing passion. I often like to try to illustrate the different paths that nurses take to reach different points in their career.

Arlene:                 Okay. Mine was quite complicated perhaps. It seems like I never did anything the easy way. I became a nurse through a diploma program, Mountainside hospital in Montclair, New Jersey. Then I realized in my junior year the ANA position statement came out saying that you should have a BSN in Nursing. So after graduation having worked a year in the Coronary Care Unit I transferred to work in Virginia. I had a cousin at the University of Virginia who highly recommended this university. So I wrote a letter, found out they were very short-staffed in coronary care. I obtained a position and, at the same time, went on to take college courses in the evenings to get my Bachelor of Science in Nursing. Having done that, I also got married, had three children and took a hiatus from my career. It was always intensive care at that point. I stayed home for about five years to raise three children under three. Then I went back to school to get a Masters. While I was getting the Masters, realized how much I liked Nursing Research and with encouragement from several mentors decided to going on for a PhD. After the PhD I was – once again my career transformed – I got a K01 award from NIH and decided to pursue Nursing History. We had just opened one of two Nursing History cen...