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

by Sarah DiGregorio, Ann Marie Gideon (Read by)

Overview

“DiGregorio’s storytelling is pitch-perfect; narrative and nursing, she understands, come from the same place and both are concerned with a deep understanding of character and plot….This is a brilliant book, and DiGregorio is a beautiful writer. Taking Care deserves to be on the reading list for nursing and medical schools, and on the bedside table of all politicians."—New York Times Book Review

In this sweeping cultural history of nursing from the Stone Age to the present, the critically acclaimed author of Early pays homage to the profession and makes an urgent call for change.

Nurses have always been vital to human existence. A nurse was likely there when you were born and a nurse might well be there when you die. Familiar in hospitals and doctors’ offices, these dedicated health professionals can also be found in schools, prisons, and people’s homes; at summer camps; on cruise ships, and even at NASA. Yet despite being celebrated during the Covid-19 epidemic, nurses are often undermined and undervalued in ways that reflect misogyny and racism, and that extend to their working conditions—and affect the care available to everyone. But the potential power of nursing to create a healthier, more just world endures.

The story of nursing is complicated. It is woven into war, plague, religion, the economy, and our individual lives in myriad ways. In Taking Care, journalist Sarah DiGregorio chronicles the lives of nurses past and tells the stories of those today—caregivers at the vital intersection of health care and community who are actively changing the world, often invisibly. An absorbing and empathetic work that combines storytelling with nuanced reporting, Taking Care examines how we have always tried to care for each other—the incredible ways we have succeeded and the ways in which we have failed. Fascinating, empowering and significant, it is a call for change and a love letter to the nurses of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798212710107
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/02/2023
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sarah DiGregorio is the critically acclaimed author of Early: An Intimate History of Premature Birth and What it Teaches Us About Being Human and Taking Care: The Revolutionary Story of Nursing, coming in May 2023. She is a freelance journalist who has written on health care and other topics for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Slate, Insider, and Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her daughter and husband.

Ann Marie Gideon is an Atlanta-based actor and voice artist. She graduated with a BFA from the University of Memphis, trained at the Accademia dell'Arte in Arezzo, Italy, and has performed in theaters across the United States. Ann Marie has been narrating audiobooks continuously since 2013 and has developed a love and passion for crafting a story through narration. With over eighty-five titles under her belt, she specializes in young adult, self-help nonfiction, contemporary female fiction, and romance.

Editorial Reviews

03/13/2023

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)

Publishers Weekly

"DiGregorio’s storytelling is pitch-perfect; narrative and nursing, she understands, come from the same place and both are concerned with a deep understanding of character and plot….This is a brilliant book, and DiGregorio is a beautiful writer. Taking Care deserves to be on the reading list for nursing and medical schools, and on the bedside table of all politicians…. It is near impossible to articulate nursing in its vastness, yet Sarah DiGregorio has condensed its profound meaning into a call to arms.” — New York Times Book Review

"This probing history of nurses situates the profession as radical, necessary health care—but plagued, too, by structural inequities from sexism to racism." — Vanity Fair

"In Taking Care, Sarah DiGregorio does the nearly impossible; seamlessly weaving together personal narratives and experiences while crafting a well-documented and researched book on the profession of nursing. DiGregorio doesn’t stop with history but includes contemporary exemplars to contextualize the complexities of racism, patriarchy, and gender oppression that shaped and continue to influence the discipline. Drawing from sources across the education, clinical practice, policy, and research spectra, DiGregorio includes quotes from individuals who are nurses, work with nurses, study nurses or nursing to create a complicated and nuanced story of the 'most trusted of the health professions.'”   — Monica R. McLemore RN, MPH, PhD, University of Washington, School of Nursing

"Taking Care is a revelation. DiGregorio tracks the necessity of caretaking from Neolithic times to our present moment of political struggle and climate change. Through informed hands-on care, patient advocacy, and an ongoing quest for justice, Taking Care shows that nurses make the world a better place."
— Theresa Brown, RN, and New York Times bestselling author of Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient and The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives.

"In precise and approachable prose, Sarah DiGregorio uses a journalist’s tools to investigate the most ethical of professions: nursing. Each chapter of Taking Care shows us that ethic up close. But health care isn’t perfect; nursing included. Taking Care explores how – if untethered from the profit motive of the medical industrial complex and the classism, sexism, and racism within and foisted upon the profession – nursing has the power to make the world a better place." — Mark Lazenby, Dean and Professor, Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing, University of California, Irvine

“Powerful...rich and beautifully written.” — Canadian Journal of Nursing Leadership

"DiGregorio succeeds in offering a new, eye-opening perspective on the significance of nursing and nurses' power to better lives." — Booklist

"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." — Publishers Weekly

"Early opens like a medical thriller . . . the heart of DiGregorio’s illuminating book isn’t just about her family’s journey; it’s an expansive examination of the history and ethics of neonatology . . . DiGregorio, a food editor and writer, is such a beautiful storyteller, I found myself underlining passages, turning corners of pages and keeping track of the page numbers at the back of the book until I had a hodgepodge of numbers scribbled on top of each other." — New York Times Book Review on EARLY

"Essential reading for medical professionals or anyone interested in improving the American healthcare system, this illuminating and inspiring book shows nurses as an integral part of their communities, fighting to overcome structural inequalities such as racism, sexism, and poverty while they try to heal the nation." — Library Journal (starred review)

“A capacious look at nurses throughout history, from prehistoric times to the present. . . . DiGregorio’s abundant evidence of the crucial and transformative practice of nursing comes through her profiles of community health nurses, first responders, reproductive health providers, nurses turned politicians, and hospice nurses. . . . A well-informed consideration of the intimacy of care.” — Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

★ 10/23/2023

While freelance journalist DiGregorio (Early: An Intimate History of Premature Birth and What It Teaches Us About Being Human) specializes in healthcare reporting, she writes that her personal experiences with amazing nurses compelled her to create this work. She and her daughter were both premature babies, and her parents required critical care before succumbing to their illnesses. More than other health professionals, compassionate and knowledgeable nurses helped guide DiGregorio and her family through these traumatic experiences. Combining history, current events, and interviews conducted with a group of nurses, DiGregorio argues that the profession arose from the innate human impulse to care for the vulnerable and that this concern for humanity could tackle today's most significant problems, if only nurses had the agency to do so. Powerful examples include nurses who are reaching out to the Orthodox Jewish community to address vaccine-hesitant members and nurses advocating for heat-protection standards for agricultural workers. VERDICT Essential reading for medical professionals or anyone interested in improving the American healthcare system, this illuminating and inspiring book shows nurses as an integral part of their communities, fighting to overcome structural inequalities such as racism, sexism, and poverty while they try to heal the nation.—Beth Farrell

Library Journal

2023-02-21
A warm appreciation of the nursing profession.

Freelance journalist DiGregorio, author of Early, a history of premature birth, celebrates nursing in a capacious look at nurses throughout history, from prehistoric times to the present. Rather than focus only on hospital practice, the author sees nursing “as a biological science and as hands-on caring, as professional and as domestic, as skills and as relationships, as knowing in the mind and knowing in the body.” Before university-trained physicians dominated medical care, creating a hierarchy that defined nurses as their menial assistants, hands-on caring was provided by lay physicians, herbalists, midwives, members of religious communities, mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, who passed down skills and potions to heal wounds and repair vulnerable bodies. Nursing, the author asserts, did not begin in Victorian England with the tireless—though racist and classist—Florence Nightingale. DiGregorio highlights the work of some famous nurses, including Lillian Wald, who established a visiting nurse system, and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. But most of her abundant evidence of the crucial and transformative practice of nursing comes through her profiles of community health nurses, first responders, reproductive health providers, nurses-turned-politicians, and hospice nurses. As the largest portion of the workforce, 4 million registered nurses practice in the U.S., and 90% are women. Although there is no nursing shortage, hospitals often cut nursing staff to keep costs low: “Nurses are considered a hospital expense,” writes DiGregorio, “because their practice is usually not billable to insurance the way physicians’ services are.” Overworked and exhausted, many are engaging in collective action, a move the author believes should get active public support. As one nurse told her, “Nursing is a profoundly radical profession that calls society to equality and justice, to trustworthiness and to openness. The profession is, also, radically political: it imagines a world in which the conditions necessary for health are enjoyed by all people.”

A well-informed consideration of the intimacy of care.

Kirkus Reviews