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American Nursing: A Biographical Dictionary: Volume 3 by 
Behind the Veil: An Australian Nurse in Saudi Arabia by
Lydia Laube worked as a nurse in Saudi Arabia in a society that does not allow women to drive, vote, or speak to a man alone. Wearing head-to-toe coverings in stifling heat, and battling administrative apathy, Lydia Laube kept her sanity and got her passport back.'Behind the Veil'is the hilarious account of an Australian woman's battle against the odds.
Bold Women of Medicine: 21 Stories of Astounding Discoveries, Daring Surgeries, and Healing Breakthroughs by 
Clara Barton: Civil War Hero and American Red Cross Founder by 
East Texas Daughter by
In a moving and forthright personal account, the first black woman admitted to a school of professional nursing in Dallas, Texas, recounts poverty-stricken childhood in East Texas, her struggle to become an R.N., her professional successes and their toll on her personal life.
Florence Nightingale: The Angel of the Crimea, A Story for Young People by 
Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850 - 1940 by
The image of the female caregiver holding a midnight vigil at the bedside of a sick relative is so firmly rooted in our collective imagination we might assume that such caregiving would have attracted the scrutiny of numerous historians. As Emily Abel demonstrates in this groundbreaking study of caregiving in America across class and ethnic divides and over the course of ninety years, this has hardly been the case. While caring for sick and disabled family members was commonplace for women in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America, that caregiving, the caregivers'experience of it, and the medical profession's reaction to it took diverse and sometimes unexpected forms. A complex series of historical changes, Abel shows, has profoundly altered the content and cultural meaning of care. Hearts of Wisdom is an immersion into that'world of care.'Drawing on antebellum slave narratives, white farm women's diaries, and public health records, Abel puts together a multifaceted picture of what caregiving meant to American women--and what it cost them--from the pre-Civil War years to the brink of America's entry into the Second World War. She shows that caregiving offered women an arena in which experience could be parlayed into expertise, while at the same time the revolution in bacteriology and the transformation of the formal health care system were weakening women's claim to that expertise.
Hildegard Peplau: Psychiatric Nurse of the Century by
Hildegard Peplau's 50-year career in nursing left an indelible stamp on the profession of nursing, and on the lives of the mentally ill in this country. She wore many hats -- founder of modern psychiatric nursing, innovative educator, advocate for the mentally ill, proponent of advanced education for nurses, Executive Director and then President of the American Nurses Association, and prolific author. She raised her daughter as a single parent while pursuing an ambitious professional path. Her determined manner often aroused controversy which never deterred her commitment to advancing the nursing profession.
Hospital Sketches by
Although best known as a writer of fiction who produced such classics as Little Women, Louisa May Alcott lived a fascinating life that included a stint as a Civil War nurse. This collection includes several essays, letters, and other pieces that outline Alcott's experiences serving to the needs of the war wounded. It's a fascinating account that will enthrall Civil War buffs or those with an interest in the history of medical practice.
Mary Breckinridge: The Frontier Nursing service & Rural Health in Appalachia by
In 1925 Mary Breckinridge (1881-1965) founded the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS), a public health organization in eastern Kentucky providing nurses on horseback to reach families who otherwise would not receive health care. Through this public health organization, she introduced nurse-midwifery to the United States and created a highly successful, cost-effective model for rural health care delivery that has been replicated throughout the world. In this first comprehensive biography of the FNS founder, Melanie Beals Goan provides a revealing look at the challenges Breckinridge faced as she sought reform and the contradictions she embodied. Goan explores Breckinridge's perspective on gender roles, her charisma, her sense of obligation to live a life of service, her eccentricity, her religiosity, and her application of professionalized, science-based health care ideas. Highly intelligent and creative, Breckinridge also suffered from depression, was by modern standards racist, and fought progress as she aged--sometimes to the detriment of those she served. Breckinridge optimistically believed that she could change the world by providing health care to women and children. She ultimately changed just one corner of the world, but her experience continues to provide powerful lessons about the possibilities and the limitations of reform.
Nurses in War: Voices from Iraq and Afghanistan by
This unique volume presents the experience of 37 U.S. military nurses sent to the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters of war to care for the injured and dying. The personal and professional challenges they faced, the difficulties they endured, the dangers they overcame, and the consequences they grappled with are vividly described from deployment to discharge. In mobile surgical field hospitals and fast-forward teams, detainee care centers, base and city hospitals, medevac aircraft, and aeromedical staging units, these nurses cared for their patients with compassion, acumen, and inventiveness. And when they returned home, they dealt with their experience as they could. The text is divided into thematic chapters on essential issues: how the nurses separated from their families and the uncertainties they faced in doing so; their response to horrific injuries that combatants, civilians and children suffered; working and living in Iraq and Afghanistan for extended periods; personal health issues; and what it meant to care for enemy insurgents and detainees. Also discussed is how the experience enhanced their clinical skills, why their adjustment to civilian life was so difficult, and how the war changed them as nurses, citizens, and people.Key Features: Describes verbatim the experiences of 37 nurses in two brutal, chaotic theaters of warOffers poignant encounters with patientsIncludes advice, clarity, and lessons learned about nursing in warOffers a women's health perspective on working and living in a war zoneDemonstrates the dedication, expertise, and spirit of military nurses
Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps by
In 'Nursing Civil Rights', Charissa J. Threat investigates the parallel battles against occupational segregation by African American women and white men in the U.S. Army. As Threat reveals, both groups viewed their circumstances with the Army Nurse Corps as a civil rights matter.
Nursing, Physician Control, and the Medical Monopoly: Historical Perspectives on Gendered Inequality in Roles, Rights, and Range of Practice by
The authors trace the efforts by physicians over time to achieve a monopoly in healthcare, often by subordinating nurses - their only genuine competitors. Efforts by nurses to reform many aspects of health care have been repeatedly opposed by physicians, whose primary interest has been to achieve total control over the healthcare 'system', often to the detriment of patient's health and safety.
Nursing's Greatest Leaders: A History of Activism by
Information on:
Florence Nightingale
Mother Mary Aikenhead
Clara Barton
Margaret Higgins Sanger
Sister Elizabeth Kenny
Clara Louise Maass
Dorothea Lynde Dix
Lillian D. Wald
Mary Breckinridge
Edith Louisa Cavell
Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine by
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, two thousand women physicians formed a significant and lively scientific community in the United States. Many were active writers; they participated in the development of medical record-keeping and research, and they wrote self-help books, social and political essays, fiction, and poetry. Out of the Dead House rediscovers the contributions these women made to the developing practice of medicine and to a community of women in science. Susan Wells combines studies of medical genres, such as the patient history or the diagnostic conversation, with discussions of individual writers. The women she discusses include Ann Preston, the first woman dean of a medical college; Hannah Longshore, a successful practitioner who combined conventional and homeopathic medicine; Rebecca Crumpler, the first African American woman physician to publish a medical book; and Mary Putnam Jacobi, writer of more than 180 medical articles and several important books. Wells shows how these women learned to write, what they wrote, and how these texts were read. Out of the Dead House also documents the ways that women doctors influenced medical discourse during the formation of the modern profession. They invented forms and strategies for medical research and writing, including methods of using survey information, taking patient histories, and telling case histories. Out of the Dead House adds a critical episode to the developing story of women as producers and critics of culture, including scientific culture.
Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine by
When first published in 1985, Sympathy and Science was hailed as a groundbreaking study of women in medicine. It remains the most comprehensive history of American women physicians available. Tracing the participation of women in the medical profession from the colonial period to the present, Regina Morantz-Sanchez examines women's roles as nurses, midwives, and practitioners of folk medicine in early America; recounts their successful struggles in the nineteenth century to enter medical schools and found their own institutions and organizations; and follows female physicians into the twentieth century, exploring their efforts to sustain significant and rewarding professional lives without sacrificing the other privileges and opportunities of womanhood. In a new preface, the author surveys recent scholarship and comments on the changing world of women in medicine over the past two decades. Despite extraordinary advances, she concludes, women physicians continue to grapple with many of the issues that troubled their predecessors.
Vietnam War Nurses: Personal Accounts of 18 Americans by
Eighteen nurses who served in the United States military nurse corps during the Vietnam War present their personal accounts in this book. They represent all military branches and both genders. They served in the theater of combat, in the United States, and in countries allied with the U.S. They served in front line hospitals, hospital ships, large medical centers and small clinics. They speak of caring for casualties during a conflict filled with controversy--and of patriotism, of the nursing profession, of travel and the adventure of friendship and love.
Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America by
Women physicians in nineteenth-century America faced a unique challenge in gaining acceptance to the medical field as it began its transformation into a professional institution. The profession had begun to increasingly insist on masculine traits as signs of competency. Not only were these traits inaccessible to women according to nineteenth-century gender ideology, but showing competence as a medical professional was not enough. Whether women could or should be physicians hinged mostly on maintaining their femininity while displaying the newly established standard traits of successful practitioners of medicine. Women Physicians and Professional Ethos provides a unique example of how women influenced both popular and medical discourse. This volume is especially notable because it considers the work of African American and American Indian women professionals. Drawing on a range of books, articles, and speeches, Carolyn Skinner analyzes the rhetorical practices of nineteenth-century American women physicians. She redefines ethos in a way that reflects the persuasive efforts of women who claimed the authority and expertise of the physician with great difficulty. Descriptions of ethos have traditionally been based on masculine communication and behavior, leaving women's rhetorical situations largely unaccounted for. Skinner's feminist model considers the constraints imposed by material resources and social position, the reciprocity between speaker and audience, the effect of one rhetor's choices on the options available to others, the connections between ethos and genre, the potential for ethos to be developed and used collectively by similarly situated people, and the role ethos plays in promoting social change. Extending recent theorizations of ethos as a spatial, ecological, and potentially communal concept, Skinneridentifies nineteenth-century women physicians'rhetorical strategies and outlines a feminist model of ethos that gives readers a more nuanced understanding of how this mode of persuasion operates for all speakers and writers.