Mandated by the Affordable Care Act, public health demonstration projects have been touted as an innovative solution to the nation's health care crisis. Yet, such projects actually have a long but little-known history, dating back to the 1920s. This groundbreaking new book reveals the key role that these local health programs - and the nurses who ran them - influenced how Americans perceived both their personal health choices and the well-being of their communities. Nursing with a Message transports readers to New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, charting the rise and fall of two community health centers, in the neighborhoods of East Harlem and Bellevue-Yorkville. Award-winning historian Patricia D'Antonio examines the day-to-day operations of these clinics, as well as the community outreach work done by nurses who visited schools, churches, and homes encouraging neighborhood residents to adopt healthier lifestyles, engage with preventive physical exams, and see to the health of their preschool children. As she reveals, these programs relied upon an often-contentious and fragile alliance between various healthcare providers, educators, social workers, and funding agencies, both public and private. Assessing both the successes and failures of these public health demonstration projects, D'Antonio also traces their legacy in shaping both the best and worst elements of today's primary care system.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014! 2014 winner of the American Association for the History of Nursing's Mary M. Roberts Award for Exemplary Historical Research and Writing! The Routledge Handbook on the Global History of Nursing brings together leading scholars and scholarship to capture the state of the art and science of nursing history, as a generation of researchers turn to the history of nursing with new paradigms and methodological tools. Inviting readers to consider new understandings of the historical work and worth of nursing in a larger global context, this ground-breaking volume illuminates how research into the history of nursing moves us away from a reductionist focus on diseases and treatments and towards more inclusive ideas about the experiences of illnesses on individuals, families, communities, voluntary organizations, and states at the bedside and across the globe. An extended introduction by the editors provides an overview and analyzes the key themes involved in the transmission of ideas about the care of the sick. Organized into four parts, and addressing nursing around the globe, it covers: New directions in the history of nursing; New methodological approaches; The politics of nursing knowledge; Nursing and its relationship to social practice. Exploring themes of people, practice, politics and places, this cutting edge volume brings together the best of nursing history scholarship, and is a vital reference for all researchers in the field, and is also relevant to those studying on nursing history and health policy courses.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014! 2014 winner of the American Association for the History of Nursing's Mary M. Roberts Award for Exemplary Historical Research and Writing! The Routledge Handbook on the Global History of Nursing brings together leading scholars and scholarship to capture the state of the art and science of nursing history, as a generation of researchers turn to the history of nursing with new paradigms and methodological tools. Inviting readers to consider new understandings of the historical work and worth of nursing in a larger global context, this ground-breaking volume illuminates how research into the history of nursing moves us away from a reductionist focus on diseases and treatments and towards more inclusive ideas about the experiences of illnesses on individuals, families, communities, voluntary organizations, and states at the bedside and across the globe. An extended introduction by the editors provides an overview and analyzes the key themes involved in the transmission of ideas about the care of the sick. Organized into four parts, and addressing nursing around the globe, it covers: New directions in the history of nursing; New methodological approaches; The politics of nursing knowledge; Nursing and its relationship to social practice. Exploring themes of people, practice, politics and places, this cutting edge volume brings together the best of nursing history scholarship, and is a vital reference for all researchers in the field, and is also relevant to those studying on nursing history and health policy courses.

This new interpretation of the history of nursing in the United States captures the many ways women reframed the most traditional of all gender expectations--that of caring for the sick--to create new possibilities for themselves, to renegotiate the terms of some of their life experiences, and to reshape their own sense of worth and power.

For much of modern U.S. history, nursing was informal, often uncompensated, and almost wholly the province of female family and community members. This began to change at the end of the nineteenth century when the prospect of formal training opened for women doors that had been previously closed. Nurses became respected professionals, and becoming a formally trained nurse granted women a range of new social choices and opportunities that eventually translated into economic mobility and stability.

Patricia D'Antonio looks closely at this history--using a new analytic framework and a rich trove of archival sources--and finds complex, multiple meanings in the individual choices of women who elected a nursing career. New relationships and social and professional options empowered nurses in constructing consequential lives, supporting their families, and participating both in their communities and in the health care system.

Narrating the experiences of nurses, D'Antonio captures the possibilities, power, and problems inherent in the different ways women defined their work and lived their lives. Scholars in the history of medicine, nursing, and public policy, those interested in the intersections of identity, work, gender, education, and race, and nurses will find this a provocative book.

Nursing History Review, an annual peer-reviewed publication of the American Association for the History of Nursing, is a showcase for the most significant current research on nursing history. Regular sections include scholarly articles, over a dozen book reviews of the best publications on nursing and health care history that have appeared in the past year, and a section abstracting new doctoral dissertations on nursing history. Historians, researchers, and individuals fascinated with the rich field of nursing will find this an important resource.Included in Volume 26... Different Places, Different Ideas: Reimagining Practice in American Psychiatric Nursing After World War II Evolving as Necessity Dictates: Home and Public Health in the 19th and 20th Centuries "Women's Mission Among Women": Unacknowledged Origins of Public Health Nursing The Triumph of Proximity: The Impact of District Nursing Schemes in 1890s' Rural Ireland More than Educators: New Zealand's Plunket Nurses, 1907-1950 To Care and Educate: The Continuity Within Queen's Nursing in Scotland, c. 1948-2000