A hundred years ago nurses did not always happen into the profession by choice.  The book of medicine as we follow it shows us that 90 years ago, it was expected that most mothers would perform the nursing functions for their entire family. They were expected to have a rudimentary understanding of how to care for their family if they became ill or injured and to care for them long enough until a doctor could arrive.

Professional nurses, did not always enter into the career by choice.  Treated as much as a servant almost as opposed to a medical professional or care giver.

Today, things have changed dramatically.  Nurses often find themselves in very lucrative and respectable careers.  The times have changed a great deal and its no longer uncommon for men to take up careers as nurses.  There are many types of degrees and even more importantly specialties that nurses can track into within school.

With all of the specialties available from nursing anesthesiologists, to nurse mid-wives that can prescribe medicine, to LPN's and RPN's and much more, its very important for people considering a future in nursing to look closely at themselves and determine not only if nursing is a good fit, but why nursing might be a good fit and then what area of nursing to study and pursue for a career.

There is a huge demand for nurses all across the country.  Pay scales for different specialties in nursing vary widely.  If money is important its important to understand that the difference in starting pay for nurses with specialties can be as wide as $120,000 per year (that's the amount of the difference between starting salaries of $150,000 per year versus $30,000 per year!).  Choosing the right path for financial reasons can definitely be important up front.

If the degree of responsibility is important, or if a certain degree of autonomy is desirable then its important to consider certain specialties that might provide the right fit for these types of personalities that are predisposed to responsibility and autonomy.

Then if you are looking to ask yourself where to start, its also important to consider what learning environments work for you and how you learn certain subjects in those environments.  As an example, I can study history online easily, but I took a statistics course online once and was miserably lost for several weeks.  I had to repeat the course in a real class and it was much easier.  I went on to get my master's online and soon realized that some classes require hands on instruction in a classroom and some are best suited for online study.  The subject matter comes into play, the professor's styles and organization levels come into play and much more.  Online learning can be a massive relief for people that have inflexible schedules, but it does not mean that you will spend less time working. 

This is a highly demanding career path both physically, mentally, and emotionally.  Some people are naturals and some people are not naturals at all but through perseverance and very hard work become extremely capable and skilled.  You have to ask yourself if this is a fit for you, why its a fit, how its a fit, what you can do to be successful in nursing and what you will need to do to be successful in obtaining your nursing degrees and certifications.

Good luck, based on my own studies online and through my examination of this book, I can tell you that learning to be nurse today is much easier, much more rewarding, and at the same time much more challenging and possibly more dynamic!

Additional Articles from the Book of Medicine:

• Applying the Test for Lead
  
  

  Applying the Test for Lead. — the sulfide of ammonium may be purchased at a small cost, save for $.25 an ounce, of most dealers and chemicals; and, as its odor is extremely disagreeable, it should be carefully corked until the moment it is used. The experiment should be made upon half a pint of the suspected water; and, if the contamination is supposed to be caused by lead pipes, it is a good plan to test a portion of the liquid which has stood overnight in the conduits. The mode of discriminating the precipitate caused by iron from those due to the dangerous metals, lead and copper, is to let fall a few drop of hydrochloric acid, called also muriatic acid, into the fluid. If the brownish or yellowish brown tent disappears, we may know that innocent iron is the only metallic impurities; whilst if, on the contrary, no change is effected by the addition of the acid, one of the poisonous metals, better copper, is present. No water, however, in which the slightest change is produced by adding the sulfide of ammonium, should be swallowed by man or beast until a rigid investigation by a competent water analyst has proved it to be harmless.

  I somehow doubt that sulfide of ammonium costs that amount today.  Its probably either much more expensive or sold in ridiculous bulks at every grocery store, pharmacy and gas station next to the Phentermine in one of those combination aisles that sells just a little bit of everything, but never the thing you really need.

• Impure Ice As a Cause of Diarrhea.
  
  

  Impure Ice As a Cause of Diarrhea.  — the fact that ice is now used by almost all classes to an extent which entitles it to rank rather as a necessity than, as formally, as a luxury of life, renders it important that its purity should be is jealously guarded as the water supply.  It is popularly believed that water freeze itself from dangerous organic matter, as it does to a great degree from certain saline contaminations during the process of freezing, and also that the vegetable or animal germs of typhoid and other fevers are killed, or at least rendered sterile, by congelation of the water in which they exist.  Both these ideas are, however, unquestionably running us, as has been repeatedly proved by the various experiments which ignorant hotel keepers try without the least intending it, upon their guests, on a scale which would have the oldest vivisector stand aghast before the suffering inflicted, even if it were only upon the brutes which form the subjects of his researches.

• Body Sculpture Turns to Lipo Sculpture
  
  

  There was a time when people carved the human figure and marble or would grieve and dipped it in a precious metal like gold or bronze.  Michelangelo’s David might even be considered an example of man’s attempt to sculpt the perfect person.

  That was hundreds of years ago and today we are reaching a point where we can literally sculpt the perfect person while they are alive.  I’m not talking about anything macabre, I’m talking about the science of plastic surgery.

  Today people have the option of going to a surgeon to have imperfections in the body corrected.  They can seek los angeles cosmetic surgery experts to help them correct or crooked nose or improve a smile or he raise harder and wrinkles and provide a net or talk or boost.

  With the invention of the technique known as liposuction, and all of the advances that are made in this technique year after year and month after month, people can now scope their body to fit the mold and model in their minds eye.  People travel from many different places to have their figure or their body re-formed by the hands of a beverly hills liposculpture Doctor.

  Within a short amount of time in a short amount of recovery they can go back out of the world literally a new person.

  This type of concept would have been completely foreign to people hundred years ago.  Surgery in general was extremely risky a hundred years ago, and it would have been completely impractical and even dangerous back then to consider cosmetic surgery.  It’s amazing what a hundred years can do for this particular science.  Surgery is still very serious and dangerous, but science and medicine have improved so drastically that the mortality rate for general surgery is nowhere near what it used to be and now doctors can even perform smaller surgeries with techniques that are becoming less and less invasive every single year.