Advanced practice is a contemporary term that has evolved to label an old phenomenon: nurses providing care to others in their surrounding communities. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English (1973) note, “Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists of western history . . . they were pharmacists, cultivating herbs and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were midwives, travelling from home to home and village to village” (p. 3). Today, with health care dominated by a male-oriented medical profession, APNs are seen as nurses “pushing the envelope”—the envelope of regulated, standardized nursing practice.