"This volume of poetry and prose is written by nurses about their experiences of caring. It describes their disasters, their triumphs, their joy and sorrow. It is, quite simply, wonderful. . . . Beg, steal, or borrow this book; if that fails, buy it."--Nursing Times "Their [the nurses'] words expand the practice of nursing as well as the practice of language. By bearing witness to the intimate details of nursing, from the mundane to the beautiful to the tragic, they reveal the epiphanies of life and death."--ADVANCE for Nurse Practitioners "A striking, often beautiful collection which brings to speech what occurs between the caring and the cared for--moments at the edges of life when, for most of us, even crucial communication seems beyond the reach of words. Coming now, Between the Heartbeats seems a particularly important book, breaking as it does the silence of women and men who, perhaps more than any others, live the essentials behind the health care debate."--Honor Moore, author of The White Blackbird "Powerful, honest and vivid, this collection of stories and poetry gives voice to the compassion and grief felt by nurses from around the world. A compelling and graceful anthology which will touch any reader, regardless of medical background."--Creative Health Care Resources "A new class of authors who are experienced professionals as well as skilled and talented writers, these nurses write out of a powerful sense of the immediacy of the body, the concreteness of suffering, and the nuanced individuality of their patients. Honest, vivid, and unsentimental, the works of this collection will not fail to move--at times even astonish--medical and nonmedical readers alike."--Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, College of Medicine, Pennsylvania State University "The best nurses have always been holistically oriented: they are the inevitable sharers of our mind, body, and soul secrets. Reading Between the Heartbeats, we share theirs. These fine poems, stories, and memoirs are honed, harrowing, and surprisingly life-affirming vignettes of the here and now. Between the Heartbeats is a splendid merger of the healing and written arts."--Dick Allen, Director of Creative Writing, University of Bridgeport Nurses who are also creative writers have a powerful empathetic outlet for the joys and griefs of their everyday experiences. In Between the Heartbeats an international, diverse community of nurses write honestly and compassionately about their work. By unsentimentally translating out suffering into prose and poetry, the registered nurses in this brave, graceful anthology perform another enduring act of loving care. THIS HAPPENED Cortney Davis My point is that illness is not a metaphor ... --Susan Sontag The intern and I begin our rounds. In room two, the intern watches me; he doesn't like this patient anyway-- she's messy, a see-through plastic tube pulls bile from her stomach to a bottle near her head. A small balloon inside her throat keeps pressure on vessels wrecked by years of gin. The patient's wide awake, but she can't talk. I see her eyes open, her skin pale at the moment these veins blow, like a tire blows. Blood backs up her nose. She tries to sit; her wrists are tied. I take her hand and say, OK. OK. The intern leaves. Next the patient's gut lets go. Stool and blood clot between her legs, hot and soft, not like sex, more like giving birth. OK, I say. We let our fingers intertwine. By 8:15 the woman calms. Clots thicken in her throat; she holds her breath. At nine, blood coins close her eyes. I breathe deep, stroke the patient's arm. The intern, who went downstairs to sleep, will ask me later. But what happened here can't be said again and be the same. WHAT ABEL SAYS Patricia Maher Abel talks in stories. He tells me a string of them about the sea and a small boat anchored yet moving with the wind and water. Abel tells me he too is anchored anchored to his house by the dirt, he says. I listen, realizing my silence is the precious thing I bring. It makes space for hope. My breathing is shallow the stench is so deep at Abel's. My foot stamps to keep the gray mice away his pets, he says since he lost his dog. He eats cold beans out of the can happy for my company. Frayed shirt and long beard his shoes are molded to his feet. I took them off for him once but now we just stand facing his mantle and look at the pictures and bills. His wife's pocketbook although she's long gone sits open as if she might return like an anchor he can't bear to pull up nor can I, yet. INSTRUCTING A NEW MOTHER Dawn Ramm Like a Little Barracuda the newborn latches on-- nurses until a nipple bleeds. Move him to the other breast, I advise-- speak for the hospital and for the numerous books I have read: how to hold him how to open his mouth how to break the suction with a finger. Yet I never knew my body as this mother does-- its natural capacity. I measured exact amounts of evaporated milk, Karo syrup and water. The efficient nurse who contaminated nothing.

Beginning in the 1960s, second-wave feminism inspired and influenced dramatic changes in the nursing profession. Susan Gelfand Malka argues that feminism helped end nursing's subordination to medicine and provided nurses with greater autonomy and professional status. She discusses two distinct eras in nursing history. The first extended from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, when feminism seemed to belittle the occupation in its analysis of gender subordination but also fueled nursing leaders' drive for greater authority and independence. The second era began in the mid-1980s, when feminism grounded in the ethics of care appealed to a much broader group of caregivers and was incorporated into nursing education. While nurses accepted aspects of feminism, they did not necessarily identify as feminists. Nonetheless, they used, passed on, and developed feminist ideas that brought about nursing school curricula changes and the increase in self-directed and specialized roles available to caregivers in the twenty-first century.

An analysis of the efforts of American nurses to establish nursing as an academic discipline and nurses as valued researchers in the decades after World War II.

Nurses represent the largest segment of the U.S. health care workforce and spend significantly more time with patients than any other member of the health care team. Dr. Nurse probes their history to examine major changes that have taken place in American health care in the second half of the twentieth century. The book reveals how federal and state health and higher education policies shaped education within health professions after World War II.

Starting in the 1950s, academic nurses sought to construct a science of nursing—distinct from that of the related biomedical or behavioral sciences—that would provide the basis for nursing practice. Their efforts transformed nursing’s labor into a valuable site of knowledge production and proved how the application of their knowledge was integral to improving patient outcomes. Exploring the knowledge claims, strategies, and politics involved as academic nurses negotiated their roles and nursing’s future, Dr. Nurse highlights how state-supported health centers have profoundly shaped nursing education and health care delivery. 

The untold story of Boston’s Floating Hospital and the nurses whose work redefined infant care

In late nineteenth-century Boston, nearly one in five babies did not survive infancy. Each summer, outbreaks of “summer complaint”—a deadly gastrointestinal illness caused by contaminated cow’s milk—swept through the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Infants born to immigrant families were especially vulnerable, trapped in stifling tenements with poor sanitation and little access to safe nutrition. Searching for a solution, reform-minded Bostonians looked to New York City’s hospital boats, which offered sick children relief from the heat. In the summer of 1894, Boston launched its own bold experiment: the Boston Floating Hospital.

What began as a modest charitable venture in Boston Harbor soon transformed pediatric care. While physicians have long received credit for the Floating Hospital’s success in reducing infant mortality, Harbor of Hope tells a deeper story. Historian Arlene W. Keeling reveals the essential and often overlooked role of nurses. It was nurses who translated medical theory into lifesaving practice: feeding and bathing fragile infants, administering treatments, calming anxious mothers, and carefully observing each child’s response. Serving as the vital link between doctors and families, they became the heart of the Floating Hospital’s mission.

Tracing the hospital’s story from its first voyage to its tragic destruction by fire in 1927, Harbor of Hope situates these nurses within a city undergoing dramatic change. Against the backdrop of rapid industrial growth, mass immigration, and emerging movements in public health and social reform, Keeling shows how skill, compassion, and persistence reshaped the fate of Boston’s most vulnerable children. Set afloat on Boston Harbor, this is a powerful story of caregiving, innovation, and the women who fought day after day to save babies’ lives.

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. Each conducted separate integration campaigns to end the discrimination they suffered. Yet their stories defy the narrative that civil rights struggles inevitably arced toward social justice. Threat tells how progressive elements in the campaigns did indeed break down barriers in both military and civilian nursing. At the same time, she follows conservative threads to portray how some of the women who succeeded as agents of change became defenders of exclusionary practices when men sought military nursing careers. The ironic result was a struggle that simultaneously confronted and reaffirmed the social hierarchies that nurtured discrimination.

"The itinerant nurses traveled by dog team and later by bush plane, experienced dangers and hardships their stateside colleagues could scarcely comprehend.... For the most part they matched the rigors of the environment with a dauntless spirit." So read a 1954 report on the women nurses who lived and worked in rural Alaska in the first half of the twentieth century. They traveled by dog team, river boat, or sea-going vessel to isolated communities with extreme weather conditions and poor sanitation. In the days before antibiotics, they encountered epidemics of diphtheria and typhoid, as well as the enduring presence of tuberculosis in all its forms.

With a Dauntless Spirit compiles a unique collection of journals, letters, and memoirs that give immediacy and vitality to the lives of these women. They ventured with a sense of duty and compassion to deliver much-needed medical services before the technical, medical, and social changes brought to Alaska by World War II and later by statehood. Despite physical hardships and emotional isolation, the spirit of these women is reflected in the adventurous, dramatic, and even joyous tone of their narratives. The arctic tests the character of many newcomers, and the nurses recount the very personal challenges that demanded choices and actions that ran contrary to their earlier socialization. Their personal sagas also have significant historical dimensions. They depict the major cultural encounters of their era that were to have such a profound impact on Alaska's future-with Native peoples, prospectors, aviation pioneers, and arctic explorers.

This collection was selected from personal and archival sources by Alaska nurse educators and historians, who provide background and commentary, a brief biography of each person, and historical photos and maps of the nurses' lives and work. With a Dauntless Spirit is a readable and engrossing account that makes an important and overdue contribution to Alaska history and women's history.

In late 1942, along with so many others who signed up to support the war effort, thirty-year-old Mildred Radawiec left a comfortable position as a nurse at the University of Michigan Hospital and postponed her marriage to a soon-to-be doctor to volunteer as a surgical nurse in the major battle theaters of the war. Radawiec was one of thirty volunteers from the hospital surgical staff that comprised the University of Michigan Unit, the 298th General Hospital, as the University of Michigan Hospital was called.

Radawiec's first-person history recounts her wartime experience with sharp detail and grace and sets the stage for a you-are-there experience---from the thrill of signing up and shipping out; to the harrowing ocean crossing and the arduous trip through the Sahara; to dangerous air raids and moving at a moment's notice, often at night with the lights off to avoid attacks. Radawiec was near Omaha Beach in France soon after D-Day, June 6, 1944, and details stories of marathon stints assisting the injured on the front lines as they poured in by the hundreds. Radawiec also traveled to Belgium and Germany and set up in the area near Aachen in the fall of 1944. In Germany she experienced Buzz Bombs---pilotless flying bombs---and even witnessed the death of a fellow nurse in a bombing attack in which medics brought in wounded soldiers by the truckload. Radawiec also leavens her story with uplifting tales of heroism and courage and intersperses the narrative with poignant letters from her family and fiancé.

This stirring personal account of war will mesmerize anyone interested in World War II history and women's too-often-overlooked role in it.