[Nursing science education: a non audible discipline with variable geometry]. / L'enseignement des sciences infirmières : une discipline inaudible à géométrie variable.

How to teach sciences of nurses if words science and nurse are not placed in their meaning and history of their evolution ? Even with doctoral training of high level academic or postdoctoral, it is impressive to see that experienced researchers are still dependent for understanding of their works, the dominant visions of collective representations and the weight of the past.The occupation may no longer think only care or sick, but it must also consider the conditions of knowledge production within its Hautes Écoles and its use within the health system.

[Fundamental research in nursing sciences. Historical research on the foundations of a discipline]. / Recherche fondamentale en science infirmière la recherche historique sur les fondements d'une discipline.

For lack of serious fundamental research in History on the standardization of its own discipline, the nursing profession continues to be fed by clichés, common sense, and relies on symbols and faiths stemming from the past as well as on what characterizes in a general way the female careers in our society. The lack of recognition experienced by the nursing profession is not so surprising from then on. At the time of the globalization of knowledge, which remains to this day, the only source of sustainable competitive advantage, the historian of the nursing discipline should start wondering about the international status of his discipline within the learned worlds.

The world's first secular autonomous nursing school against the power of the churches.

Secular healthcare practices were standardized well before the churches' established their influence over the nursing profession. Indeed, such practices, resting on the tripartite axiom of domus, familia, hominem, were already established in hospitals during the middle ages. It was not until the last third of the eighteenth century that the Catholic Church imposed its culture on secular health institutions; the Protestant church followed suit in 1836. In reaction to the encroachment of religious orders on civil society and the amalgam of religious denominations favored, for example, by the devout Florence Nightingale (supported, in 1854, by Sir Sidney Herbert, the influential Puseyite), it is on 20 July 1859 that the great Swiss nineteenth century pedagogue and recipient of the Académie française Gold Medal, Valérie de Gasparin-Boissier (1813-94), proposed a model of secular healthcare training for nurses that would become a counter-model set in opposition to religious health institutions. Forerunner of later schools, the world's first secular autonomous Nursing School was founded in Lausanne, Switzerland. Its mission was to bring decisive changes to the statutes of nurses' training, which were then still based on six principles not far removed from those of religious communities at the time: commitment for life, the Rule of St Augustine, obedience, celibacy, the renouncement of salary, and the uniform.