girl in greenwood

Nurse
by Peggy Anderson

I read this book while in a frenzy of nurse-book-reading last year. This was a tough read for me - while it was published in 1990, the author reminisces about her beginning years as a nurse in the early 1970s. Man, things were different then. Not only did she have to wear a ridiculous uniform, the (all male) doctors treated nurses like crap, and there weren't as many technological advancement to treat severely ill patients as there are today. The procedures and techniques she writes about are mostly obsolete today (like when she makes fun of other nurses for putting gloves on to do peri-care [that's butt-wiping for those of you not in the health care field]) - but the emotional experience of being a nurse has not changed. It's still tough to see your patients lose their battles with cancer or heart disease, it's still hard to get chewed out by a family members, and it's still rewarding when you realize that you've made a difference in someone's life.

I was chatting with the director of the nursing program yesterday about my reading habits, and she was pleased to hear that I'd read some of these not-so-recent nurse stories. She made the excellent point that some of the nurses who were trained in the 1960s or 1970s are still working in the field today, and knowing what their experiences were like may help me see things from their point of view.

Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale
by Gillian Gill

No nurse's historical background is complete without reading about Florence Nightingale. I personally didn't know much about her, just that she was considered the founder of nursing, and that she was known as the Lady with the Lamp.

The book begins with a detailed genealogy of Flo's parents and their families... which seemed boring to me but does have relevance later in Flo's life. One of the major familial themes has to do with the inheritance law in Great Britain at the time - since women could not own property in their own right, the ladies in the families were desparate to produce sons in order to preserve their own lifestyles. This sets the stage for Florence's mother's complete outrage when Florence refuses to marry. Florence had a sister, but no brothers, and so after the death of her father, her mother was out on her ear. Okay, not literally, but one of Flo's cousins inherited the family estate because Florence's mother could not legally inherit her husband's property.

Anyway, about the nursing stuff - it seems that Flo was always a very religious and very sensitive, guilt-ridden child. She decided quite early in childhood that she wanted to care for needy creatures, and took in countless pets. She also cared for her sister and her cousins (she was very close with many of her cousins) when they were ill, and seemed to take great pleasure in the act of caring. One theme that cropped up over and over in Flo's private writing was of her overwhelming guilt about some unnamed bad thing that she felt compelled to do over and over. I crassly interpreted that as masturbation, but the author believes that Florence had a deep tendency to daydream or fantasize, which took her away from the concerns of the material world, which caused her tremendous guilt.

Oh, right, the nursing stuff. Florence insisted on taking nurse's training, which caused her upperclass family no end of grief. At that time, nurses were either nuns (and the Nightingales were Protestant) or else they were "working girls" who were alleged to be drunken prostitutes and lousy patient advocates. Florence refused to back down and eventually her family gave in, reluctantly. After training, Florence immediately took on an activism role, advocating for sanitation, a healthy diet, and peaceful surrounding to help patients heal. During the Crimean War, British soldiers in Turkey were dying hand-over-fist, and with the help of her family's connection, Florence managed to get herself appointed to the hospital treating the wounded at Scutari. She loaded a ship with medical supplies that she convinced wealthy friends to donate, recruited a staff of women to train as nurses, and took off for Turkey. The Army's medical director was not impressed with Florence's demand that he give over operations of the hospital to her, but eventually changed his mind after she sad, mule-like, out on her boat in the harbor and refused to hand over the medical supplies.

Once she got inside the hospital, Florence insituted all kinds of changes. She insisted that each soldier needed his own bed with clean linens. She demanded that the dressings on the soldiers' wounds be changed regularly, and the wounds washed with soap and water and redressed with clean bandages. She insisted that the kitchen be sanitized, and that all the soldiers required a healthy diet to be able to heal. And most of all, she showed the wounded men that she cared, personally visiting each one of them. She got the name "The Lady of the Lamp" because she carried around a small lamp as she walked the wards at night visiting soldiers who couldn't sleep or needed comfort.

There's a lot more that Florence did to advance the profession of nursing. But since I'm not writing my own book on her, I'm going to stop there.

Labels: book reports, nursing