A Brief History of Turkish Nursing

The traditional roots of modern nursing in Turkey date back to the efforts of Florence Nightingale, who cared for wounded English and Turkish soldiers in Selimiye Barracks in Istanbul during the Crimean War (1854-1856). Until then, care of the wounded and sick was the responsibility of informally trained women. After the Crimean War, eleven nurses came to Turkey from Germany with Nightingale’s care principles in mind. The necessity for trained nurses in Turkey reached its peak, however, during the Balkan War (1912-913) and World War I (1914-1918), which brought large numbers of wounded and sick soldiers and refugees to hospitals. While early efforts in nursing were influenced by nurses from Western Europe, it was a local Turkish physician, Besim Ömer Akalın Pasha, who first emphasized the need for special training in nursing education in Turkey. The article provides a brief overview of the history of military nursing in nineteenth and twentieh century Turkey.