nursing fiction/nonfiction

Trophywife81 · Dec 20, 2007

I am a big fan of British mystery author PD James. Her novel "Shroud for a Nightingale" takes place at an English nursing school, and is a really excellent read!

CaLLaCoDe, BSN, RN · Dec 20, 2007

A great book, not a pretty good book, I can recommend: Intensive Care by Echo Herron. This is the book that spoke the reality of nursing plus made me think, huh, I could do this nursing thing! No matter if it was written in the 1980s, it still holds its own!

RNperdiem, RN · Dec 20, 2007

"Tending Lives" by Echo Heron is a great collection of nurses' stories. Echo has written a few other books too. I have a fondness for vintage nursing books. A couple of nursing textbooks are from the 1930's and one from the 1950's.

"The Changing Image of the Nurse" is a great nonfiction book.

"Student Nurse-Her Life in Pictures" follows nurses through hospital based training. The book was written in the 1950's. Love the starched aprons and caps!

"The Advance of American Nursing" by Kalisch and Kalisch is the most comprehensive history of nursing book I have read.

"The Pro-Nurse Handbook" by Melodie Chenervert is a modern book all about surviving and thriving in nursing. Encouraging assertiveness is her strong point.

ACLS handbook

Books written from a doctor's point of view are more common. Atul Gawande writes some of the best. "The Least of These My Bretheren" is the story of a doctor at work in an AIDS hospital, and is recommended.

casi, ASN, RN · Dec 20, 2007

Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife by Peggy Vincent

We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese by Elizabeth M. Norman

And If I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II by Evelyn Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee

Can anyone tell I'm a WWII non-fiction fan?

nursemary9, BSN, RN · Dec 20, 2007

I am a big fan of British mystery author PD James. Her novel "Shroud for a Nightingale" takes place at an English nursing school, and is a really excellent read!

Agree with you; I really enjoyed this book & her others, for that matter.

nursemary9, BSN, RN · Dec 20, 2007

A great book, not a pretty good book I can recommend: Intensive Care by Echo Herron. This is the book that spoke the reality of nursing plus made me think, huh, I could do this nursing thing! No matter if it was written in the 1980s, it still holds its own!

I enjoy all of echo Herron's books--fiction & non-fiction.

AngelfireRN, MSN, RN, APRN · Dec 20, 2007

I like all the Cherry Ames books by Helen Wells. They are fiction, and came out in the WWII era.

Bed Number 10 is a true story about a woman named Sue Baier who had Guillian-Barre'. We had to read it in nursing school, and the general consensus was that she was nothing but a whiner. Not a good read if you have just had a truckload of demanding patients.

I read "Nurse" a while back. I thought it was a good book.

pagandeva2000, LPN · Dec 20, 2007

You guys have got me to join the bandwagon. I have read Echo Herron's books many years ago, even before I thought of becoming a nurse. It may be worth the time to re-read them for a different perspective. I am going to write a list of these books and start getting them for myself.

kythe, LPN · Dec 20, 2007

I read "The Nurse's Story" by Carol Gino many years ago, long before I ever went to school. It really influenced how I saw nursing as a career, and I think I knew then that nursing is what I wanted to do.

bagladyrn, RN · Dec 21, 2007

One I've recommended to others before is "The Healer's War" by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. It's an older book of hers, may be out of print but should be available through used book sites. It's fiction, but based on her experiences as a nurse in Viet Nam during the war.

marie-francoise · Dec 21, 2007

Some recent non-fiction:

Faye Satterly's Where Have All the Nurses Gone?

Suzanne Gordon's Nursing Against the Odds