This first and only in-depth analysis of the attire worn by the largest workforce in the health care system explores the role of the nurse's uniform in creating nursing identity for over a hundred years. The introduction of the nurse's uniform in the late nineteenth century was part of a strategy to legitimize North America's first nursing schools. At first varied and experimental in design, by the early 20th century the uniform was drawing on elements of fashionable, scientific, military and ecclesiastical wear, and had standardized into a blue or pink dress worn with stiffly starched white cap, bib, and apron. This remarkable outfit lasted until the 1970s, when educational and societal changes brought about its demise, and practical scrubs became the most common nursing apparel. Seen through the lens of age, gender, class and race, this book shows how the uniform was an active participant in the changing culture of nursing work and thought. Richly illustrated with images of actual garments and over 150 compelling period photographs, cartoons and drawings, the book explore the uniform within the contexts of hospital, community, nursing school, and residence. A Cultural History of the Nurse's Uniform will appeal to nurses, historians and scholars of dress.

"The authors demonstrate how U. S. nurses have worked throughout their history to restore patients to health, teach health promotion, and participate in disease preventing activities. Recounting those experiences in the nurses' own words, the authors bring that history to life, capturing nurses' thoughts and feelings during times of war, epidemics, and disasters as well as during their everyday work. The book fills a gap in the secondary literature on...the history of nursing that can be useful in these times of great social change. It is a “must read” for every nurse in the United States!" --Barbra Mann Wall, PhD, RN, FAAN; Director of the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry; University of Virginia; From the Foreword For over four hundred years, a diverse array of nurses, nurses' aides, midwives, and public-minded citizens across the United States have attended to the healthcare of America’s equally diverse populations. Beginning in 1607 when the first Englishmen landed in Virginia, and concluding in 2016 when Flint, Michigan, was declared to be in a state of emergency, this expansive nursing history text for undergraduate and graduate nursing programs examines the history of the nursing profession to better understand how nursing became what it is today. Grounded in the premise that health care can and should be promoted in partnership with communities to provide quality care for all, this history analyzes the resilience and innovation of nurses who provided care for the most underprivileged populations, such as slaves on Southern plantations, immigrants in tenements in Manhattan's Lower East Side, and isolated populations in rural Kentucky. It takes into account issues of race, class, and gender and the influence of these factors on nurses and patients. Featuring nearly 300 photos, oral histories, and case examples from varied settings in the United States and beyond, the narrative discusses major medical advances, prominent leaders and grassroots movements in nursing, and ethical dilemmas that nurses faced with each change in the profession. Chapters include discussion questions for class sessions as well as a list of suggested readings. Key Features: Examines the history of nursing during the last four centuries Links challenges for nurses in the past to those of present-day nurses Includes oral histories, case examples, boxed highlights, call-outs, discussion questions, archival sites, and references Covers drugs, technological innovations, and scientific discovery in each era Demonstrates progression toward “A Culture of Health” as described by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The image of the nurse is ubiquitous, both in life and in popular media. One of the earliest instances of nursing and media intersecting is the Edison phonographic recording of Florence Nightingale's voice in 1890. Since then, a parade of nurses, good, bad or otherwise, has appeared on both cinema and television screens. How do we interpret the many different types of nurses--real and fictional, lifelike and distorted, sexual and forbidding--who are so visible in the public consciousness? This book is a comprehensive collection of unique insights from scholars across the Western world. Essays explore a diversity of nursing types that traverse popular characterizations of nurses from various time periods. The shifting roles of nurses are explored across media, including picture postcards, film, television, journalism and the collection and preservation of uniforms and memorabilia.

With her soft linen head scarf and white apron emblazoned with a red cross, the Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, or VAD, has become a romantic emblem of the First World War. This Small Army of Women draws on diaries, letters, and interviews to tell the forgotten story of the nearly two thousand women from Canada and Newfoundland who volunteered to “do their bit” at home and overseas. Middle-class and well-educated but largely untrained, VADs were excluded from Canadian military hospitals overseas (the realm of the professional nurse) but helped solve Britain’s nursing deficit and filled gaps in Canada’s domestic nursing ranks. Their dedication and struggle to secure a place at their brothers’ bedsides reveals much about women’s contributions to the war effort, the tensions between amateur and professional nurses, and women’s evolving role outside the home.

Marion Dewar could never ignore a person who was begging in the street. Along with money, she would offer words of encouragement and friendship. Perhaps it was her training as a nurse, her devout Catholic upbringing, or maybe it was simply because she was a genuinely compassionate woman. As mayor of Ottawa from 1978-1985, Marion Dewar worked tirelessly to bring about non-profit housing, better public transportation, support and encouragement for the arts, for peace, and for women's rights. She advocated for visible minorities, gays and lesbians, and was the driving force behind the initiative to bring 4,000 boat people to Ottawa from Vietnam and Southeast Asia. She was a prominent member of the New Democratic Party and sat as a Member of Parliament in 1987-1988 - all while raising four children. Accompanied by archival and personal photos, an intriguing look at a woman who took action when it counted most.

This book aims to introduce nurses and other healthcare professionals to how anthropology can help them understand nursing as a profession and as a culture. Drawing on key anthropological concepts, the book facilitates the understanding and critical consideration of nursing practice, as seen across a wide range of health care contexts, and which impacts the delivery of appropriate care for service users. Considering the fields in which nurses work, the book argues that in order for nurses to optimize their roles as deliverers of patient care, they must not only engage with the realities of the cultural world of the patient, but also that of their own multi-professional cultural environment. The only book currently in the field on anthropology of nursing, this book will be a valuable resource for nursing students at all academic levels, especially where they can pursue specific modules in the subject, as well as those other students pursuing medical anthropology courses. As well as this, it will be an essential text for those post-graduate students who wish to consider alternative world views from anthropology and their application in nursing and healthcare, in addition to their undertaking ethnographic research to explore nursing in all its fields of practice.

Presents a series of anecdotes that tell the history and meaning of American uniforms, identifying their cultural significance in terms of how uniforms unite and divide people as well as how they vary throughout the world.