Nurse Practitioners provide a vital healthcare link particularly in areas that face doctor shortages. Learn about the history of nurse practitioners here.
Battlefield nursing in the United States from the Revolutionary War.
Clara Barton
Clara Barton, Professional Angel
by
Elizabeth Brown Pryor
Widely known today as the "Angel of the Battlefield," Clara Barton's personal life has always been shrouded in mystery. In Clara Barton, Professional Angel, Elizabeth Brown Pryor presents a biography of Barton that strips away the heroic exterior and reveals a complex and often trying woman. Based on the papers Clara Barton carefully saved over her lifetime, this biography is the first one to draw on these recorded thoughts. Besides her own voluminous correspondence, it reflects the letters and reminiscences of lovers, a grandniece who probed her aunt's venerable facade, and doctors who treated her nervous disorders. She emerges as a vividly human figure. Continually struggling to cope with her insecure family background and a society that offered much less than she had to give, she chose achievement as the vehicle for gaining the love and recognition that frequently eluded her during her long life. Not always altruistic, her accomplishments were nonetheless extraordinary. On the battlefields of the Civil War, in securing American participation in the International Red Cross, in promoting peacetime disaster relief, and in fighting for women's rights, Clara Barton made an unparalleled contribution to American social progress. Yet the true measure of her life must be made from this perspective: she dared to offend a society whose acceptance she treasured, and she put all of her energy into patching up the lives of those around her when her own was rent and frayed.
Call Number: HV569.B3 P78 1987
ISBN: 9780812280609
Publication Date: 1987-10-29
Clara Barton
by
Dorothy Brenner Francis
Chronicles the life of Clara Barton, from her early days as a teacher to her work with the Bureau of Records and her establishment of the American Red Cross.
From the Digital Public Library of America, check out this extensive list of sources, teachers' guide, and other materials about the beginning of the American Red Cross.
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
by
Lynn McDonald (Editor)
Although Florence Nightingale is famous as a nurse, her lifetime's writing on nursing is scarcely known in the profession. Nursing professors tend to "look to the future, not to the past," and often ignore her or rely on faulty secondary sources. Nightingale's work on nursing is now available to scholars and general readers alike through the publication of volumes 12 and 13 in the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Volume 12, The Nightingale School, relates the founding of her school at St Thomas' Hospital and her guidance of its teaching for the rest of her life.
Call Number: EBOOK
ISBN: 9781554581696
Publication Date: 2009-11-17
Florence Nightingale and Hospital Reform
by
Lynn McDonald (Editor)
This book demonstrates Nightingale's astute use of the political process and reports on her correspondence with royalty, viceroys, and leaders, including such notables as Queen Victoria and W. E. Gladstone. This book confirms Nightingale as a significant nineteenth-century scholar and illustrates how she integrated her scholarship with political activism. The volume includes her influential Notes on Hospitals, with its much-quoted musing on the need of a Hippocratic oath for hospitals - namely, that first they should do the sick no harm. Nightingale's anonymous articles on hospital design are printed here also, as are later encyclopedia entries on hospitals. Correspondence with architects, engineers, doctors, philanthropists, local notables, and politicians is included. The results of these letters, some with detailed critiques of hospital plans, can be seen initially in the great British examples of the new "pavilion" design - at St. Thomas', London (a civil hospital), at the Herbert Hospital (military), and later at many hospitals throughout the UK and internationally. Nightingale's insistence on keeping good statistics to track rates of mortality and hospital stays, and on using them to compare hospitals, can be seen as good advice for the contemporary era, given the new versions of "hospital-acquired infections" she sought to combat.
From the National Women's History Museum, a short biography and list of other resources about Florence Nightingale, an innovator in European-style battlefield nursing and hygiene.
From the American Association for the History of Nursing, a biography of Mary Carson Breckinridge, an important figure in the history of midwifery and rural health care.