Customer Reviews

Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850-1945 (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine)

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I enjoyed this book immensely. The author chronicles the history of nursing from pre-training schools to post-WW11. The author is not a nurse and her focus is on the history of women in society. The book is broken down into three parts - the nurse and the hospital before training (two chapters), the trained nurse: an apprentice to duty (four chapters), and the "re-forming" of nursing (four chapters). The style is easy to read and very detailed with narratives, biographies, and statistics. Anyone who is interested in the history of nursing should read this book.

This text is the foremost in documented nursing history. The references and citations are well researched and edited. There are few books about nursing's beginning to the mid-20th century -this one is the best!