Nurses’ Books Need More Media Attention

In my last post, I told you about a couple of books I discovered—short story collections written by nurses. Lynn Rosack wrote a comment on my last post reminding me that Echo Heron, whose book I covered, Emergency 24/7: Nurses of the Emergency Room (2015) had written other nursing books. One of them, Intensive Care: A Story of a Nurse (1988) made the New York Times best seller list. She also wrote Condition Critical: The Story of a Nurse Continues (1994) and Tending Lives: Nurses on the Medical Front (1998).

Here is a short list of other memoirs by nurse authors, in no particular order:

• The Door of Last Resort: Memoir of a Nurse Practitioner by Frances Ward (2013)

• Caring Lessons: A Nursing Professor’s Journey of Faith and Self by Lois Roelofs (2010)

• Beautiful Unbroken: One Nurse’s Life by Mary Jane Nealon (2011)

• Cooked: An Inner City Nursing Memoir by Carol Karels (Second Edition 2005)

• Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife by Peggy Vincent (2002)

In researching books by nurses, I discovered a wonderful resource: books.google.com. I had no idea that there were so many books about nursing by nurses —from a book on the Public Health Nurse from 1919 to a new book not yet released by Josephine Ensign, Catching Homelessness: A Nurse’s Story of Falling Through the Safety Net (2016).

The books I found on googlebooks.com included stories about frontier, hospice, school and rural health nursing, and military nurses in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, among other settings. (I am limiting my search to nurse authors from the USA).

I am impressed with the scope and number of nursing books out there—although these numbers are nowhere near those of physician authors, and physician books attract more media attention. Great that we nurses are writing our books but we still need to find a way to gain the attention/publicity that physicians receive when they publish their books.