A year's work for the children in New York schools

From its first issue in 1900 through to the present day, AJN has unparalleled archives detailing nurses' work and lives over the last century. These articles not only chronicle nursing's growth as a profession within the context of the events of the day, but they also reveal prevailing societal attitudes about women, health care, and human rights. Today's nursing school curricula rarely include nursing's history, but it's a history worth knowing. To this end, From the AJN Archives will be a frequent column, containing articles selected to fit today's topics and times.This month's article, from the December 1903 issue, addresses school nursing. It was written by Lina L. Rogers, a nurse at the Henry Street Settlement in New York City, who, along with Settlement founder Lillian Wald, established the first school nurse program in the United States. At the time, physicians already visited the city's schools, but Rogers notes that they saw their role as simply one of excluding infected children from the classroom. The nurses' objective was, Rogers writes, "quite the reverse-namely, to keep the child in school." Over 110 years later, we are still trying to convince administrators that the services provided by school nurses are "a part of their educational system which they cannot neglect."