<P> In the U.S., the role of public health nurse began in Los Angeles in 1898, by 1924 there were 12,000 public health nurses, half of them in the 100 largest cities . Their average annual salary in larger cities was $1,390 . In addition, there were thousands of nurses employed by private agencies handling similar work . Public health nurses supervised health issues in the public and parochial schools, to prenatal and infant care, handled communicable diseases and tuberculosis and dealt with an aerial diseases . </P> <P> During the Spanish--American War of 1898, medical conditions in the tropical war zone were dangerous, with yellow fever and malaria endemic . The United States government called for women to volunteer as nurses . Thousands did so, but few were professionally trained . Among the latter were 250 Catholic nurses, most of them from the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul . </P> <P> Sporadic progress was made on several continents, where medical pioneers established formal nursing schools . But even as late as the 1870s, "women working in North American urban hospitals typically were untrained, working class, and accorded lowly status by both the medical profession they supported and society at large". Nursing had the same status in Great Britain and continental Europe before World War I . </P> <P> Hospital nursing schools in the United States and Canada took the lead in applying Nightingale's model to their training programmers: </P>

History and development of nursing in ancient times