In 1925 Mary Breckinridge (1881-1965) founded the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS), a public health organization in eastern Kentucky providing nurses on horseback to reach families who otherwise would not receive health care. Through this public health organization, she introduced nurse-midwifery to the United States and created a highly successful, cost-effective model for rural health care delivery that has been replicated throughout the world. In this first comprehensive biography of the FNS founder, Melanie Beals Goan provides a revealing look at the challenges Breckinridge faced as she sought reform and the contradictions she embodied. Goan explores Breckinridge's perspective on gender roles, her charisma, her sense of obligation to live a life of service, her eccentricity, her religiosity, and her application of professionalized, science-based health care ideas. Highly intelligent and creative, Breckinridge also suffered from depression, was by modern standards racist, and fought progress as she aged--sometimes to the detriment of those she served. Breckinridge optimistically believed that she could change the world by providing health care to women and children. She ultimately changed just one corner of the world, but her experience continues to provide powerful lessons about the possibilities and the limitations of reform.

This is the autobiography of Mary Breckinridge, the woman who founded the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) in the mountains of eastern Kentucky in 1925. Riding out on horseback, the FNS nurse-midwives proved that high mortality rates and malnutrition did not need to be the norm in rural areas. By their example and through their graduates, the FNS exacted a lasting influence on family health care throughout the world.

A biography of the woman who gave up the riches and comfort of her aristocratic birth to serve as a nurse in the Kentucky mountains where she established the Frontier Nursing Service.

The fourth edition of the only text to focus on nursing concepts, theory, and practice in rural settings continues to provide comprehensive and evidence-based information to nursing educators, researchers, and policy-makers. The book presents a wealth of new information that expands upon the rural nursing theory base and greatly adds to our understanding of current rural health care issues. It retains seminal chapters that consider theory and practice, client and cultural perspectives, response to illness, and community roles in sustaining good health. Authored by contributors from the United States, Canada, and Australia, the text examines rural health issues from a national and international perspective. The 4th edition presents new chapters on: Border health issues Palliative care Research applications of rural nursing theory Resilience in rural elders Vulnerabilities Health disparities Social disparities in health Use of rural hospitals in nursing education Establishing nursing education following disaster Public health accreditation in rural and frontier counties Developing the workforce to meet the needs for rural practice, research, and theory development Key Features: Provides a single-source reference on rural nursing concepts, theory, and practice Covers critical issues regarding nursing practice in sparsely populated regions Presents a national and international focus Updates content and includes a wealth of new information Designed for nurse educators and students at the graduate level

From 1950 to 2001, Lovie Beard Shelton practiced midwifery in eastern North Carolina homes, delivering some 4,000 babies to black, white, Mennonite, and hippie women; to those too poor to afford a hospital birth; and to a few rich enough to have any kind of delivery they pleased. Her life, which was about giving life, was conspicuously marked by loss, including the untimely death of her husband and the murder of her son. Lovie is a provocative chronicle of Shelton's life and work, which spanned enormous changes in midwifery and in the ways women give birth. In this artful exploration of documentary fieldwork, Lisa Yarger confronts the choices involved in producing an authentic portrait of a woman who is at once loner and self-styled folk hero. Fully embracing the difficulties of telling a true story, Yarger is able to get at the story of telling the story. As Lovie describes her calling, we meet a woman who sees herself working in partnership with God and who must wrestle with the question of what happens when a woman who has devoted her life to service, to doing God's work, ages out of usefulness. When I'm no longer a midwife, who am I? Facing retirement and a host of health issues, Lovie attempts to fit together the jagged pieces of her life as she prepares for one final home birth.

Servant Leadership in Nursing: Spirituality and Practice in Contemporary Health Care embraces the philosophy that a true leader, in any venue, must be a servant of those he or she leads. This text includes current information on the relevance of servant leadership for nurses practicing in a health care setting with extensive literature review on leadership in nursing and healthcare as well as on servant leadership. This unique text also includes many powerful and poignant perceptions and experiences of servant leadership elicited in tape-recorded interviews with 75 nursing leaders currently practicing in the contemporary healthcare system.

In a unique and detailed historical study, Nurse-Midwifery: The Birth of a New American Profession, Laura E. Ettinger fills a void with the first book-length documentation of the emergence of American nurse-midwifery. This occupation developed in the 1920s involving nurses who took advanced training in midwifery. In Nurse-Midwifery, Ettinger shows how nurse-midwives in New York City; eastern Kentucky; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and other places both rebelled against and served as agents of a nationwide professionalization of doctors and medicalization of childbirth. Nurse-Midwifery reveals the limitations that nurses, physicians, and nurse-midwives placed on the profession of nurse-midwifery from the outset because of the professional interests of nursing and medicine. The book argues that nurse-midwives challenged what scholars have called the "male medical model" of childbirth, but the cost of the compromises they made to survive was that nurse-midwifery did not become the kind of independent, autonomous profession it might have been.