Celebrating 100 years of nurse regulation

December 2019 marks 100 years since the introduction of the Nurses' Registration Act and statutory nurse regulation in the UK. The commemoration of a century of nursing registration is a useful lens through which to view the advancement of nursing as a profession and the decades of struggle by nurses for eventual state registration.

Modern nursing is attributed to the influence of Florence Nightingale, who rose to fame during the Crimean War. Before this, nurses were often considered slovenly and incompetent, as depicted by Charles Dickens, whose nurse character Sairey Gamp in the novel Martin Chuzzlewit (first serialised in the 1840s) was to become representative of all that was bad with nursing. Indeed in 1887, in a mental health context, ‘lunatic attendants’ (who would later become ‘mental health nurses’) were referred to as the ‘unemployable of other professions’ (Norman and Ryrie, 2019).

Glasper and Charles-Edwards (2002a) pointed out that Dickens was a strong supporter of the medical fraternity and close friend of the paediatrician who founded the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street, London. Furthermore, Rafferty (1995) believed that, in developing the character of Sairey Gamp, Dickens provided the ammunition that may have destabilised and undermined the embryonic female-led working class domiciliary nursing movement in favour of a medically dominated, more subservient nursing workforce.