Taking Care: The Story of Nursing and Its Power to Change Our World

Journalist DiGregorio (Early) delivers a compassionate and nuanced history of nursing from the Neolithic period to the present day. Citing archaeological evidence of people born 8,000 years ago with life-threatening disabilities who survived into adulthood, DiGregorio pushes back on the notion that modern nursing sprung “fully formed” out of Victorian England. She also highlights discrimination and prejudice within the profession, noting that Florence Nightingale’s work during the Crimean War led to her being hailed as “the founder of modern nursing,” while her contemporary Mary Seacole was “mostly forgotten—or condescendingly referred to as ‘the Black Nightingale.’ ” Institutionalized segregation contributed to a nursing shortage during WWII, until the executive secretary of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses convinced leaders of America’s armed forces to lift racial quotas. DiGregorio also spotlights Lillian Wald, who founded the Henry Street Settlement in 1893 to provide healthcare to immigrant families in New York City’s Lower East Side, and visits the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, where 101-year-old nurse Marcella LeBeau discusses her vocation as “a way of seeing her neighbors’ pain—which was also her pain—and skillfully responding to it.” Striking an expert balance between the big picture and intimate portraits of individual caregivers, this is an enlightening study of a crucial yet often overlooked profession. (May)