A commitment to care: the development of clinical specialization in nursing

The development of clinical specialists is traced from the beginning of the profession into the present. Nurse anesthetists were the first clinical specialists to appear in the 1880s. In the 1900s, public health nurses began to specialize as infant, school, industrial, and tuberculosis nurses and midwives. From the 1950s to the present, the growth of critical care specialists paralleled the extraordinary growth of medicine. Underlying all specialization has been nursing's commitment to provide needed care.