Healing the Unsung Healers

Healing the Unsung Healers - The New York Times

Supported by
Continue reading the main story

Nonfiction

Healing the Unsung Healers

In Sarah DiGregorio’s “Taking Care,” the author explores the history, culture and crucial importance of nurses.

TAKING CARE: The Story of Nursing and Its Power to Change Our World, by Sarah DiGregorio

“Taking Care” is about the meaning of nursing in contemporary America, and its potential to drive change. Written by the journalist — and non-nurse — Sarah DiGregorio, it poses the question: Can nursing be understood from the outside? As someone who was a nurse for 20 years, I initially thought th answer was “probably not.” I was wrong.

DiGregorio weaves the history of nursing, one of the oldest professions in the world, throughout the text. We are reminded that nursing “is a thread running through all human history” and we zip from ancient India to the Neolithic Stone Age to ancient Egypt, Rome, Saudi Arabia, then the Middle Ages, when (as now) “nursing was often a radically compassionate act of bravery in the face of death.”

Defining what nursing is, and means, is not easy — but the author’s opinion of what it is not is clear. That the book challenges pervasive cultural stereotypes of nurses — dispatching with the image of the brow-mopping angel — is a literary relief. “If you imagine that nursing arose only in relatively recent times, as a profession dedicated to assisting physicians within hospitals,” writes DiGregorio, “you have it backward. Nursing came first.” Through the lens of nursing, we learn about the state of the human condition. In a chapter carefully placed at the center — “Dying” — we read about hospice care, death and dying; that nursing begins before birth and continues after death. Nurses understand that cure is not possible all the time — or, in my experience, most of the time.

And historical echoes bounce off the most urgent contemporary issues. In a chapter on the environment, the expansive role of nurses in the battle against climate change is addressed: from evacuating babies to researching heat-related kidney failure in agricultural workers to advocating for school policy that mitigates asthma rates. “Nurses are not always understood as crucial to climate change response, but they should be, because they are uniquely situated to respond.”

In the area of addiction, nurses trailblaze harm reduction clinics where people can safely inject heroin. We meet L. Synn Stern, a registered nurse who runs an overdose prevention center in New York. Here, she trains “harm reduction specialists,” including Mezon, whose role DiGregorio describes unflinchingly: how to inject, to use a tourniquet, avoid the burn of hitting an artery. And then, in a subtle takedown of the pharmaceutical industry responsible for the legacy of oxycodone, Mezon can also “show someone how to use a fentanyl test to make sure the heroin is not cut with the more potent drug.”

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. We meet Cicely Saunders, who founded St. Christopher’s Hospice in 1947, as she cares for a 40-year-old man dying of cancer. “His pain — physical, existential, emotional — changed the course of Saunders’s life and of history,” DiGregorio writes. “Their intimacy gave her an understanding of what she would come to call ‘total pain,’ a combination of the physical symptoms, mental distress, social problems and spiritual needs that come with dying.”

DiGregorio doesn’t explicitly state that we might extend Saunders’s term to include the circumstances so rampant in our moment: mental illness, violence, poverty and loneliness. For too many people now, simply living is painful.

“Taking Care” never shouts. It doesn’t need to. But there is quiet anger on every page, especially in the wake of political shifts that render caregiving harder than ever. “With Roe now overturned, abortion criminalized in some states, and other privacy-based rights in jeopardy, reproductive care in the United States is more threatened than usual. And nurses and midwives are, again and always, stepping into that breach.” We are reminded that advocacy and activism are key functions of modern-day nursing.

DiGregorio, in turn, advocates for nurses. “Can we be human without nursing?” she asks. Indeed, if a measure of our society is how we treat the most vulnerable, then how we treat nurses is surely a measure of our humanity. I could barely read the paragraphs about Covid-19, as, having returned to clinical nursing during the pandemic, I strongly relate to the population “frantically called back to work that, by some accounts, left half of all nurses with post-traumatic stress disorder.”

And no wonder: “During the pandemic, nurses have been asked to work without proper protection, have been the only witness to death upon death upon death. Some nurses have died themselves as a result of exposures at work.”

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. Of course, it isn’t perfect. (That would be too annoying.) Camaraderie on the front lines — the teamwork between nurses, physicians and allied health professionals — felt like an omission. It is the glue that holds us up. Weaving in DiGregorio’s personal story — her mother’s care, for example — while heartfelt, did not feel substantive enough; it was the one part of the narrative where I remembered I was not hearing from a nurse.

But perhaps there is strength in DiGregorio’s outsider status. The scope of nursing described here, and the diversity of nurses giving accounts, might not have been possible otherwise. Nursing is a language with many accents — and, accentless, DiGregorio is able to present a wide range of voices to evoke the full power of nursing. Nursing is science and art, it is physiology and pharmacology and advocacy and ethics, and biology and story and sociology and philosophy. It is near impossible to articulate nursing in its vastness, yet Sarah DiGregorio has condensed its profound meaning into a call to arms. “Taking Care” reminds us that perhaps more than ever before, nursing is politics.

Christie Watson is Professor of Medical Humanities at UEA and worked as an NHS nurse for over twenty years. She is the author of five books. TAKING CARE: The Story of Nursing and Its Power to Change Our World | By Sarah DiGregorio | 310 pp. | Harper/HarperCollins Publishers | $32