The story of care
In her book, Sarah DiGreggorio pays homage to nursing profession and union nurses’ role in empowering it
By Chuleenan Svetvilas
National Nurse magazine - Oct | Nov | Dec 2024 Issue
Taking Care: The Story of Nursing and Its Power to Change Our World by Sarah DiGreggorio
HarperCollins
Taking Care: The Story of Nursing and Its Power to Change Our World is an engaging, clearly written book that gives nurses long overdue recognition of their significance throughout history—from the Neolithic Stone Age to the present day. “Human societies simply could not have developed and functioned the way that they have without nursing,” writes Sarah DiGregorio. “Sooner or later, we all need to be nursed… Sometimes, nurses are the first and last people to touch us.”
The author offers her perspective as a journalist and as a parent who was reassured by nurses at different stages in her daughter’s life, such as when she was in the neonatal intensive care unit and when she was hospitalized with severe asthma as a 4 year old. DiGregorio’s parents and daughter had chronic illnesses, and she accompanied them to numerous hospital and clinic visits. She noted that “almost every single time, the person who offered what we needed was a nurse. I’ve come to understand that that was not a coincidence.”
Through detailed research, fascinating historical details, and personal stories gleaned from interviews, DiGregorio covers a lot of ground—from evidence of nursing 8,000 years ago and the critical role of nursing in response to climate change, to RNs specializing in addiction and nurses’ union power, including California Nurses Association’s (CNA) successful fight for a RN-to-patient ratios law. She begins with the work of scholars and archeologists whose research provides evidence of prehistoric nursing: skeletons thousands of years old that revealed people who would not have survived debilitating conditions, such as spina bifida and polio, without nursing care. She notes that the History Channel and Wikipedia mistakenly trace nursing’s origins to Florence Nightingale in the 19th century and that the singular focus on Nightingale as “the [author’s emphasis] prototypical nurse has stripped nursing of its truer, more sweeping history and of the power that lies within that.”
Taking Care, released in paperback earlier this year, examines the role of nursing during times of war, particularly who was allowed to nurse soldiers. Nightingale only hired white women to serve as nurses during the Crimean War, assigning them duties based on their class, with middle-class women as head nurses and working-class women providing most of the direct patient care and laundry, cooking, and cleaning services. Black nurses in the United States faced blatant racism when they tried to serve during World War I and World War II. Male nurses were barred from serving, regardless of color. Despite a severe shortage of nurses during WWII, the army surgeon general planned only to allow 56 Black nurses to serve in segregated hospital wards at army bases in the U.S. South. But Black nurses, led by Mabel Staupers, RN, of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN), fought to get the army to increase its quota for Black nurses, eventually getting it to “about 300 out of a total of about 44,000 in 1944.” Black nurses founded NACGN in 1908 because the American Nurses Association (ANA) refused to admit them.
Toward the end of Taking Care, in a chapter titled “Collective,” DiGregorio describes CNA’s fight to implement the ratios law in 2004 when then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had issued an emergency order to stop the law. The nurses prevailed and their “victory was born of nurses not playing ‘nice,’ a quality that has often been demanded of them throughout history in order to silence them,” writes the author. That chapter also touches on CNA’s history, particularly how CNA broke away from the ANA. “I think the essential thing we did was that we changed the paradigm of the nursing organization to pursue power instead of prestige,” said Gerard Brogan, RN and director of nursing practice at CNA/NNOC and NNU when the author interviewed him.
DiGregorio looks at the reasons why nurses leave the profession, eloquently describing moral injury: when nurses “have more patients than they can safely care for, and when they are forced to participate in a situation that goes against their deepest sense of what is right.” She also mentions that labor organizations have worked to improve working conditions, noting that NNU affiliates organized nearly 5,000 nurses across “eight different hospital systems since the pandemic began, more workers than any other single union during this period.” (The hardcover version of the book was released in May 2023.)
The author clearly understands the challenges nurses face, including the reasons that force nurses to strike: “When nurses say they are striking for patient safety, it might sound like just another slogan, but the available evidence shows that it is true that the devaluing of nursing is the devaluing of human lives.” This is a book every nurse should read.
Chuleenan Svetvilas is a communications specialist at National Nurses United.