It Took Courage, Compassion, and Curiosity - Recollections and Writings of Leaders in Cancer Nursing

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Foreword

During the last two centuries, nursing emerged as a distinct work assigned the social task of caring for the sick, assisting women in childbirth, and helping the well retain their health. This monumental assignment calls for personal commitment and constant striving for new knowledge and ways to ameliorate human misery. The 12 nurses whose lives are chronicled here offer a luminous view of the varied and real meaning inherent in living a life in modern nursing. With the exception of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1851-1926), all did most of their important work in the 20th century. All their stories coincide with the full development and maturing of professional nursing. But they are unique among nurses. They were determined to change the nature of the experience of sickness and thereby, each, in her own way, changed the nature of the practice of nursing.

These women chose to identify with the sickest people they found. People with cancer, a label that attracts fear, despair, and even loathing, drew these nurses on into careers worth remembering. The same forces that created nursing in the first place led these nurses to invent a specialized form of nursing—oncology nursing. They wanted to improve the treatment of the sick by applying their own knowledge and effort, and they wanted to spread new knowledge and technology as broadly as possible. They learned from the people they cared for, each other, and the physicians and other health professionals they knew, and they transformed that knowledge into a new field of understanding and care.

As nurses, they understood people with cancer as strugglers coping with a new personal situation and directed their efforts toward assisting patients with cancer in their crisis. People who do things first have to contend with being different and with the task of explaining and demonstrating their new ideas. Innovators have to reform the professional view of what is right and good in care, and they have to both respond to and direct public opinion toward demanding more and better care. They have to resist the temptation to be parochial and safe in their own environment and go out to teach a better way. In their different lives, these nurses, as you will see, did just that.

They devised ways to help their patients withstand the sometimes devastating effects of chemotherapy, radiation, or surgery. They insisted that people with cancer be treated honestly and without bias. They worked to reveal and confront Americans' avoidance and fear of death. Using every means possible, they raised the standard of knowledge in nursing and taught their students and colleagues to be better nurses.

Scholars are no doubt correct when they say that new specialties emerge because of scientific and technological changes, new ideas of social meliorism, and new patterns of work and professional structure. But I always have been intrigued by the individuals who are the first to step up and actually change things. Professions and specialties come into being through the efforts of unusual people who build new types of careers amid changing social and economic circumstances. These women exhibit a kind of wonderful restlessness. As Virginia Barckley said, "you did more than you had to do ... [it] surpassed any other satisfaction in the world" (p. 89). In one way or another, these 12 all felt compelled to interfere with and change the way people with cancer were being treated. The fruit of their dissatisfaction is a new field of nursing. This is a book about people who helped to lay the foundation for oncology nursing. Oncology nursing--a specialty now about 25 years old--is about organized, systematized learning, research, and care of people with cancer. These 12 lives are a crucial part of its history.