Tag: nurses
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Book review: Ethel Gordon Fenwick: Nursing Reformer and the First Registered Nurse
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom 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 their profession and deserve to be remembered. Among these is Ethel Gordon Fenwick, whose biography was recently written…
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Wedding anniversary
Paul RousseauCharleston, South Carolina, United States Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned…— W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming It is their tenth wedding anniversary. They are traveling to a restaurant on a black, moonless night. They round a curve as a semi-trailer truck veers across the center line.…
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Intubation incarceration: A true tale of torture
Abram GabrielPiscataway, New Jersey, United States For five days, I could not speak at all. In November 2010, I had a brainstem stroke resulting from an arteriovenous fistula. I spent nearly a month in a coma in a regional teaching hospital, and seven weeks in an acute rehabilitation center. While my mind is now clear,…
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Cinema MD: A History of Medicine on Screen
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK In 1895 Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in his lab in Wurzburg and the Lumiere brothers demonstrated cinema in Paris. X-rays revolutionized medical practice by enabling doctors to see inside the body for the first time without resorting to surgery. Cinema, also a form of image production, revolutionized entertainment in the twentieth…
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Learning to heal
Jeanne BrynerNora MazurNewton Falls, Ohio, United States Top pieced by Jeanne BrynerQuilting done by Nora Mazur Jeanne Bryner: Quilts are important in my Appalachian culture. Narratives of beauty and truth are pieced together, preserving family history. This quilt contains photos of a special family of international sisters and brothers in the nursing profession. Caring for…
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Moments in nursing
Jeanne BrynerNora MazurNewton Falls, Ohio, United States Top pieced by Jeanne Bryner Quilting done by Nora Mazur Jeanne Bryner: On any given day, one of our cells may deviate from its usual path. Others cells may follow, leading us from a state of wellness to one of illness. How can we survive this civil war?…
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“A Veritable Angel of Mercy”: the sardonic representation of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Mariella ScerriMellieha, Malta Critical acclaim and popular opinion have elevated Kesey’s first novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest published in 1962, to something of a modern classic, much read and written about as well as adapted for film. The novel is narrated in the first person by the half-Indian Chief Bromden, one of the patients…
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Grit
Romalyn AnteWolverhampton, England My mother is right—my brother’s blood is getting dirtier. A nurse like me, she had read the result of his glomerular filtration rate, a test that measures how well the kidneys clean the blood. It had dropped below 15, an indication that his chronic renal failure was reaching its end stage. Some…
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Blood at Maidan—Kyiv, Ukraine 2014
Olena KaguiRhode Island, United States There was no physical blood present when I stepped onto Maidan Square in Kyiv, Ukraine. Yet signs of it were everywhere. Bullet holes pierced the shields and helmets that memorialized the fallen. Flowers, the color of blood, sat inside the cavern of the helmet. The space, once occupied by a…
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Burnout: Are we looking at it through the wrong lens?
Elizabeth CerceoCamden, New Jersey, United States The epidemic of burnout seems to afflict ever more populations as it insidiously creeps into the workplace of everyone from nurses to teachers, from medical students to seasoned clinicians, from Amazon to Apple. As physicians, we are trained to identify a condition, make a diagnosis, and prescribe a treatment.…