Promotional Information

Patricia D'Antonio's argument will upend many of the standard beliefs about nursing and its history. She stays sensitive to the psychological and cultural tropes and debates while demonstrating a wildly sophisticated historical imagination and scholarly apparatus. This will become the book on the history of nursing. -- Susan M. Reverby, Wellesley College

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Nurses and Physicians in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia
2. Competence, Coolness, Courage—and Control
3. They Went Nursing—in Early Twentieth-Century America
4. Wives, Mothers—and Nurses
5. Race, Place, and Professional Identity
6. A Tale of Two Associations: White and African AmericanNurses in North Carolina
7. Who Is a Nurse?
Appendix
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index

About the Author

Patricia D'Antonio is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and the associate director of the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is a Senior Fellow with the Leonard Davis Institute. She is an honorary senior lecturer at the University of Manchester's School of Nursing, Midwifery, and Social Work; a coeditor of Nurses' Work: Issues across Time and Place and Enduring Issues in American Nursing, and the author of Founding Friends: Families, Staff, and Patients at the Friends Asylum in Early Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia.

Reviews

A valuable resource and an excellent addition to any library's collection for those interested in the history of nursing and the struggle of a profession to become autonomous. Doody's Review Service This new book is both a remarkable story about a noble profession and a rich illustration of the important place of the scholarly press. -- Dan Doody MedInfoNow A rich analysis. Bookwatch The vignettes in this book provoke images of nurses not as powerless but rather as strong, often independent, women who take life fully into their own hands. -- Peter I. Buerhaus JAMA [D'Antonio] posits that people chose nursing because of the meaning and power that a nursing identity brought to their lives within both family and community and over a lifetime. Choice Ambitious history of women and work... The strengths of this book are many. -- Susan L. Smith American Historical Review