Tag: Nursing
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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A portrait of dementia
Lindsay RipleyDallas, Texas, United States A few months ago, I watched The Father, a film with Olivia Colman in a main role and Anthony Hopkins as the titular father. Hopkins plays Anthony, a character who bears Hopkins’ own name because writer and director Florian Zeller wrote the part imagining Hopkins in it. Like Hopkins, now…
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Sarah Gamp: Precursor of the nursing profession
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 husky voice and a moist eye, she wore dilapidated articles of dress picked up from several second-hand clothes shops. “The face of…
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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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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…
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Matron Charlotte Evelyn Nelson (1938-1954) and her portrait by Alice Burton
Frederick John O’DellNorthampton, United Kingdom 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 General Orphan Asylum, aged six and a schoolgirl. Later she was moved into service and by the 1911 census she…
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Learning the meaning of love
Charlotte EliopoulosGlen Arm, Maryland, United States In the summer before my senior year in high school, I spent my vacation as a candy striper. In the sixties, this was an opportunity for young girls interested in nursing to serve as hospital volunteers and gain some insight into their career of choice. Being young and naïve—and…