Changes

By the 18th century, secular hospitals were now found in many parts of Protestant Europe. This further led to the idea that hospitals should be separate from church institutions and doctors were no longer required to also have religious and medical training. During this time in the Age of Enlightenment, the concept of departments or wards within hospitals developed. Patients began to be differentiated between those with acute or less severe symptomsas well as the type of condition they had. Private hospitals , or those funded by independently wealthy individuals , as charities began to appear in major cities such as London. Particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, as health care healthcare was not always easily accessible to the poor, many wealthy individuals began to take responsibility of in building hospitals. This, in effect, was replacing the Church church as the former patron of hospitals in places where Catholicism had been removed. It was during the 18th century that Europe had begun adopting something already practiced in the Middle East for centuries, which was making hospitals teaching institutions and allowing them to become places of innovation as well as care. However, practical anatomy was still rarely taught in medical colleges that were developing, even though this had already been in practice in the Middle East for some time . <ref>For more on hospitals during the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, see: Cunningham, A., & French, R. K. (Eds.). (1990). The Medical enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press.</ref>

During the 19th century, hospital care was now expanding rapidly and Protestant denominations, similar to the Catholic Church before, had begun sponsoring and supporting hospitals. Although forms of nursing had been around for centuries, it was generally less formal and often not professional in its utilization in hospitals. It was during the Crimean War that Florence Nightingale wrote her influential book <i>Notes on Nursing</i> that helped develop nursing into a profession. She utilized money raised to establish a training school at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, making that hospital to be the first to formally train nurses. Throughout the 1860s, nursing training programs were improved and professionalized, with nursing being offered as professional training in new newly established and older hospitals. During subsequent wars in the 1870-1880s, field hospitals staffed by professionally trained nurses had dramatically improved the chances for soldiers being saved from battlefield injuries.<ref>For more on nursing and its development, see: Hawkins, S. (2010). Nursing and women’s labour in the nineteenth century: the quest for independence. London ; New York: Routledge.</ref>