Nursing is, historically, a strange profession. We imagine Florence Nightingale as the precursor of a fine tradition; the classic image of the early nurse is of a missionary nun, ministering to the sick. The term ‘ward sister’ still survives, proof of the links between nursing and female monastic vocations.

However, the interest of the church in medicine has a wholly antithetical origin. Until WWII, it was part of ordinary life all over the world and throughout history for a large proportion of the male populace to be wiped out in military service. Put bluntly, the population of was subject to a cull.

In other species, the male is capable of siring a great many offspring in comparison to the female. For this reason, rather than physical build or mental resilience, men are the traditional warriors and soldiers of society; in the event of war, a nation can better survive the loss of its men than its women.

Prior to WWII, human society was very different; much of what we now take for granted had yet to be conceived. Contraception, as a case in point, was developed by the Nazis and perpetuated afterwards by the USA, with profound effects on human sexual behavior. For the first time in history, recreational sex became a pastime for all. Formally, multiple partners and other sexual freedoms were the domain of the rich man, who had the luxury of selecting and discarding women largely at will from the lower classes, his right to do so ensured by wealth, privilege and laws stretching back into history. As far back as the Norman Conquest, Prima Nochta was in common practice; a local lord was entitled to the virginity of every common-born bride in his domain.

Conversely, women have been biologically subjugated; sexual activity resulted in pregnancy. Before contraception, the only socially acceptable sexual activity for a woman was within marriage, veiled behind the privacy of family life. Religious disdain added a stigma to the pleasures of the flesh, particularly in England, while Catholic belief in Original Sin inculcated a sense of guilt over the universal imperative to reproduce. Women in particular were subject to such indoctrination, and not for any spiritual merit that mass-asceticism might bring to a nation, but to answer another difficulty faced by men in reproduction; a woman has no doubt regarding the motherhood of her child. A man can be cuckolded, and so lives in fear that his children may not be his own. To avert this, religious, societal and economic controls have been woven through human history, from legally enshrined marriage to rape and female circumcision.

The result, until the mid-twentieth century, was a world dominated by men, with female emancipation minimal at best and true equality a notion yet to be conceived. With the advent of effective contraception, society underwent a sexual revolution; the proof is seen in the East/West divide. In the west, where contraception is effective and freely available, recreational sex is an option for men and women. Pregnancy becomes optional, rather than inevitable. Modern opposition to contraception comes from the remaining bastions of the old ways; the Catholic Church and the upper echelons of the Establishment. The result is a quixotic view of sex in modern society; on the one hand, the media has embraced sexual freedom. We are bombarded night and day with sexual imagery, encouraged to be promiscuous and assured that our technology can negate the consequences. Conversely, people en mass strive to conceal their sexual behavior; we are embarrassed about it, we worry about being ‘normal’, and yet we do not seek or share genuine information; in spite of sex education, most people learn about sex from their friends, early partners, and the example set by their parents. The net result of this is that, while contraception and pregnancy are widely understood and controlled, venereal disease is widespread. VD has been prevalent wherever sexual promiscuity has been the norm, generally accompanied by prostitution.

Where does this leave the origins of nursing? Florence Nightingale ministered to soldiers, and it is under war-time conditions that the profession of nursing arose. Besides the fighting men, every army and military forcer would, prior to WWI, be accompanied by a baggage train of supplies, provisions and non-combatants. The non-combatants would be mostly women, following the troops, and would be recruited from the same classes as the fighting men. Belying the myriad stories of young lovers parted by war, many girls and women followed their men when they went to war. As the recruiters traveled, they would attract a growing band of women and children behind the marching men. Although most of the women drawn to such a life would be young and naive, there would be a proportion of widows following their sons and youths too young to enlist simply tagging along. During the Crusades, thousands of children died on the road before ever reaching the Holy Land.

Initially, each regiment would have only a small entourage. As the war of that generation progressed, armies would muster and baggage trains merge, forming a mobile city of tents and wagons, following the army. In this transient society, relationships would be brief and intense; a woman of the camp would almost never finish the war with the same man she started it. Prevalent military strategy accepted vast casualties as inevitable; by the Napoleonic wars, battlefield lethality was so high that generals would march and manoeuvre their armies for weeks around a country, avoiding battle until they were assured of advantageous terrain. As a result, almost every love affair would end in personal tragedy when the young man concerned received an enemy bullet.

With her lover gone, the girl would not be long alone; fresh reinforcements and the merging of units would ensure a rolling male population in the army while the baggage train simply grew, adding more slowly to its ranks but retaining the vast majority of recruits. New arrivals in an existing regiment would find ‘old salts’ among the women as well as the men; a girl might grow old in a regiment, possibly even finding a husband among the career men who became veterans and NCOs.

Serial monogamy would be the order of the day; young couples already traumatized by war forming intense relationships that would be abruptly terminated. The women themselves were not safe from the conflict, even behind the lines; if their regiment was utterly defeated, the victors would swiftly overtake and loot the baggage train. If the tides of war turned and the army forced into retreat, the baggage train was liable to be abandoned. Finally, it was the lifeblood of the army. Seizing the baggage train would leave the fighting men with no shelter or provisions; if the train was captured, their retreat was almost certainly cut off as well.

Whatever the cause, the captured baggage train would be added to the victor’s own supplies. The inevitability of enslavement following capture has declined over the course of human development, but the net result was women of one nation becoming hostage in a foreign camp and required to earn their keep.

The result was prostitution; along with the naive girls already discussed, the army would be pursued by organized bands of prostitutes. Many regiments had their own attached, semi-recognized brothels, which would recruit from the baggage train and population centres en route, sometimes by force. Mercenary armies in particular required the constant services of brothels. Where such services were not provided, the men satisfied their needs wherever they could, in urban brothels where available or by ravishing the countryside. The seizure of an enemy baggage train would provide the richest pickings of all, not only for the soldiers, but for slavers, madams and pimps.

Along with the dead, there were many more thousand wounded, and a shortage of doctors or men to assist them in battlefield surgery. As well as maintaining and servicing the camp, the women would be called upon to assist the wounded, retrieving them from the field, looting the fallen, providing immediate aid for injuries and assisting doctors in surgery. Initially, a woman drafted to this duty would bury the wounded soldier’s face in her bosom; before the advent of anesthetic, nothing sufficed so well against surgical distress.

Form this fairly pragmatic approach rose the practice of nursing, with nuns professionalizing the matter to combat prostitutes soliciting. This development opened nursing as an alternative military employment for women, rather than implying direct historical roots.

It is not the roots of nursing, however, but the circumstances of its development that are currently in the spotlight; the sexual behavior of human beings, male and female, under wartime conditions. Modern society is fulled, funded and geared towards war. Since WWII, the arms trade has dominated every economy on earth. We are programmed, both by the imperatives of past eras and the propaganda of warmongers, to accept military conflict as a constant backdrop to our daily lives. There is more war on earth than ever before in history, and as always, the men doing the fighting are the poor. Today, poverty is reckoned on a worldwide scale; it is not the sons of the affluent West who die in their millions, but the soldiers born and raised in the third world. Where Western troops are involved, they are always drawn from the lowest ranks in society.

The addition of contraceptives and modern medicine to the equation is, on first glance, an excellent thing; less men die, less are maimed, and the release of sex is more freely available. Historically, the human race has been swept with a generational cull of warfare, disease, and infant mortality.

In short, the human race is overdue a historical event; we have missed a cull, and are now overpopulated. Nature has already intervened; obesity, heart disease, AIDS and cancer threaten to wipe out millions worldwide; our wholesale destruction of the environment has caused repercussions of cataclysmic proportions; our own race for supremacy has left the world in the shadow of nuclear war.

But the axe has yet to fall; the west is rich, decadent, and lazy. Wealth, luxury and affluence, and our society is crumbling. The family unit is in the minority; 40% of people live alone. In the UK, binge drinking is on the rise, bringing with it violence, criminal damage, public disorder and a rise in promiscuity, drug-assisted rape and venereal disease.

Having attained a stable, viable population, we have yet to shed our wartime conditioning; the sexual behavior of men and women at war has, since WWII, spread through society and affected us all. Monogamous or promiscuous, the true nature of human sexual behavior has been lost in emergency measures; the prevalence of love stories and the notion of ‘true’ love suggest that human beings naturally form long-term, monogamous relationships. Only at war have human beings embraced successive partners. War is so deeply entrenched in our society that even the term ‘peacetime’ no longer applies; children are swamped in cartoon war-imagery, the cinemas belch forth a constant torrent of action-heroes, the news feeds endless live footage of worldwide conflict into our homes, and this state of affairs is new!

Barely fifty years ago, we fought the Second World War, following the Great War, the War to End All War… we have had nothing but war since, and our modern societies have become poisoned with it; we are behaving, sexually, as if we were at war; relationships are made and broken, promiscuity is rife, the sex trade becoming accepted. Our youth are organizing into tribal, sometimes armed units – we call them gangs. Paramilitary action is currently the highest profile crime worldwide, all in the course of past precedent. The ‘problem’ is that the men are not being killed; female suffrage through contraception has brought about a weird male equality in return; we get to live.

The cause of our modern behavior must be a history and a mentality of war; the sex trade, like every other trade, is built upon the arms industry. If promiscuity is a symptom of war conditioning, selling sex is selling war. The free-love movement has been co-opted by the warmongers; even the slogan ‘make love, not war’ now sells bullets and pays for soldier’s caps.