Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Category: Nursing

  • Nurse Helen Repa takes charge in a disaster

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “It would not be possible to praise nurses too highly.”– Stephen Ambrose, American historian On July 24, 1915, the Western Electric Company, a technology and engineering giant, had arranged an excursion and picnic for several thousand of its employees. Five Great Lakes excursion boats had been chartered to take them to a…

  • Book review: The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Well, son, I’ll tell you:Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”– Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son” At the start of the twentieth century, Dr. Hermann Biggs, chief of the New York City Department of Health, declared that tuberculosis (TB) was a reportable communicable disease. The city would be able to count…

  • Florence Nightingale

    Abigail RichardsonSheffield, UK Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), the British nurse who became known as the “Lady with the Lamp,” is remembered for her work during the Crimean War and as a statistician and public health advocate.1 Her lifelong dedication to nursing led to her being the first female Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society (1858) and…

  • Book review: Ethel Gordon Fenwick: Nursing Reformer and the First Registered Nurse

    Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Book cover of Ethel Gordon Fenwick: Nursing Reformer and the First Registered Nurse by Jenny Main. With the exception of Florence Nightingale and more recently of Mary Seacole, relatively few biographies have been written about pioneering nurses. Yet there have been many others who made great contributions to…

  • Sarah Gamp: precursor of the nursing profession

    Illustration of Mrs. Gamp by Frederick Barnard. From The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. Before the reforms introduced by Florence Nightingale, the nursing profession was exemplified by women such as the famous Sarah (Sairey) Gamp of Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit. Described as a fat woman with a…

  • Sister Kenny: The forgotten Nightingale

    Anand Raja Devaraj SushamaKerala, India Medical practices flourish and fall out of favor with time. Some become the norm only to turn redundant later; others prevail after a hard battle for acceptance. A campaign is even more arduous when the proponent is outside the establishment. Sister Elizabeth Kenny and her eponymous polio treatment, the “Kenny…

  • Matron Charlotte Evelyn Nelson (1938-1954) and her portrait by Alice Burton

    Frederick John O’Dell Northampton, United Kingdom   Miss C E Nelson, 1955, by Alice Burton. Northampton General Hospital private collection. Image photograph by the author. Charlotte Evelyn Nelson (1894-1959) was born on 13 July 1894 in Hull. Before her sixth birthday she was orphaned, as the 1901 census lists her at the Hull Seamans and…

  • Doris Unland: Surgical nurse extraordinaire

    Frederic Grannis Duarte, California, United States Doris Unland RN “scrubbed in” OR 10. Doris Unland was an extraordinary American surgical nurse who worked for forty-seven years at St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota. She may have participated in more major surgical operations than any other person—physician or nurse—in history. Born on December 19, 1910, she…

  • The art of nursing

    Isabelle J. St. John Milwaukee, WI   Cornelia Parker’s art piece appears as an explosion suspended in time, which effectively conveys how a nurse operates as an artist of care; nurses enter their patients’ lives at the moment of explosion, and they have the ability to suspend that explosion for a moment in time and…

  • Four nurses caring for one patient

    Four nurses are taking care of this sick patient, presumably in a hospital, clearly at a time when there was no nursing shortage. The one on the left is taking the patient’s pulse; one on the right seems to be staring into space. Vintage engraving of Victorian nurses caring for a dying man suffering from…