Nursing in the Anthropocene

This is a very pretentious article, full of strident opinions, asserted as if unquestionable fact. The era the authors describe as “Capitalocene” might better be called, given their methodology, “Sloganocene.” They cite opinion pieces of numerous authors, again hurled at the reader as unquestionable fact. Slogans are all you need to win an argument.
Particularly disappointing were the comments on Florence Nightingale, the major founder of the modern profession of nursing. I am an expert on her work, having published a 16-volume peer-reviewed Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, 2001-12. All the references these authors make to her are negative. They question her “legacy,” Her work has been “heralded,” they complain, but why not? Who else founded the first nurse training school in the world and, wrote leading books and articles on nursing, health care and hospital safety and mentored many of the next two generations of nursing leaders?
What did Mary Seacole do for nursing? Can the authors name one hospital where she ever nursed, one book or article she ever published on nursing or health care, one nurse she ever trained or mentored? See her excellent memoir, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, 1857 (they don’t cite it) where she describes her adventures and businesses in Panama and the Crimea She was a “herbalist” trained by her mother. But she added lead and mercury to her “herbal” remedies, and acknowledged “lamentable blunders,” a suitable term for the use of substances toxic at any dose. For bowel patients, oral rehydration is the effective treatment, but Seacole’s lead and mercury dehydrate. But I refer to evidence-based health care, which smacks of “positivism” or “empiricism” and they are no good to these authors.
They want us to believe that if it is “Indigenous” it must be good, on faith, but what about those “lamentable blunders”? Would it not be good to know what the effective ingredients are in traditional remedies, so that they can be used in other societies? Why he opposition to empirical research on them?
The authors, rightly, I believe, note the devastation of climate change and environmental deterioration. They blame capitalism, but, sadly, the devastation is terrible in the (old) Soviet Union, thanks to its belief in the domination of Nature. Materialism might be a better term than capitalism for the problem. But to address the crisis requires concerted action, and evaluation of efforts (oops that suggests the evil of positivism). Nightingale, incidentally, wrote on the harm caused by de-forestation in the 1860s, but she cited evidence, which, again, these authors would not like.
One also has to ask how this rant qualifies for acceptance in a journal supposedly about “Advances in Nursing Science.”
Lynn McDonald, PhD, LLD (hon), FRHistS, professor emerita