Luther Christman spent a sixty-year career being told what he could not do because he was a man, and is the reason men in American nursing have an organization of their own.
Barred
Christman was born on February 26, 1915 in Summit Hill, Pennsylvania, and trained at the Pennsylvania Hospital School of Nursing for Men, graduating in 1939 — a separate school, because the general ones would not take him.
The exclusions ran the length of his career:
- Two university nursing programmes refused him admission because he was male.
- He was denied his maternity clinical rotation, on the same grounds, so he could not complete the standard curriculum.
- He could not join the Army Nurse Corps in the Second World War, which was women only, and served in the Maritime Service instead.
- Applying for a deanship in the 1960s he was told directly that a man would not be considered.
Nursing had been overwhelmingly female since Florence Nightingale deliberately built it that way to give it respectability, and the exclusion of men was written into schools, corps and licensing for a century afterwards. Christman's position was that a profession which had spent decades fighting exclusion could not defend practising it.
Vanderbilt and Rush
He took a bachelor's at Temple, a master's in clinical psychology, and a doctorate in sociology and anthropology at Michigan State.
In 1967 Vanderbilt appointed him dean of its school of nursing — the first man to hold a nursing deanship in the United States.
In 1972 he went to Rush University in Chicago as dean and simultaneously as vice president for nursing affairs at the medical centre, and built what became known as the Rush model: one person accountable for both the education and the practice, with faculty required to keep a real clinical caseload rather than teaching from a distance.
The reasoning was that nursing education drifts from nursing practice when the two are run by different people with different incentives, and that students taught by faculty who have not been at a bedside in a decade learn something other than nursing. It is a live argument now, inside the nurse faculty shortage.
The American Assembly for Men in Nursing
Christman was a founder of what became the American Assembly for Men in Nursing, which still runs, and spent decades arguing that the demographic narrowness of the profession was a recruitment problem it had inflicted on itself.
He had a point that has aged well. American nursing is still roughly 88 per cent female, in a country with a chronic nursing shortage that has spent seventy years recruiting from a little over half the population.
He was named a Living Legend of the American Academy of Nursing in 1995 and inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 2004. The Rush University College of Nursing gives an award in his name.
He died on June 7, 2011 in Nashville, at 96.
Related
- The nursing shortage
- The nurse faculty shortage
- Entry into practice and the BSN requirement
- Levels of nursing
- Ildaura Murillo-Rohde
Sources
- Luther Christman, for the chronology, the exclusions and the Rush model. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- ANA Hall of Fame inductees. American Nurses Association. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- American Assembly for Men in Nursing. Accessed September 9, 2026.