The History of Professional Nursing in North Carolina, 1902-2002

The History of Professional Nursing in North Carolina, 1902-2002 By Phoebe Pollitt (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2014) (256 pages, $32.00 paper)In The History of Professional Nursing in North Carolina, 1902-2002, Phoebe Pollitt seeks to fill a gap in the history of nursing in the United States by exploring and documenting the development of the nursing profession in the southern state of North Carolina between 1902 and 2002. She argues that "North Carolina is the site of many firsts in nursing" that require historical analysis (p. 3). This work is a carefully researched compilation of the social history of nursing from the state's isolated islands known as the Outer Banks in the Atlantic Ocean to the westernmost regions of the state's Great Smoky Mountains. Pollitt examines the professionalization of nursing in this southern state through the lens of place, time, race, class, and gender. She includes women and men from different class and racial backgrounds who excelled in the art and science of nursing and rose above modest backgrounds to become successful professionals.The book chapters are organized by decade and focus on major events that propelled the nursing profession forward. The book begins with the narrative of southern women who broke from accepted female roles to seek training as professional nurses. These stories include women like Mary Lewis Wyche who sought a career of her own after keeping house for two bachelor brothers until their respective marriages. Against her upper-middle-class parents' wishes, she enrolled in the Philadelphia Hospital Training School. In 1894, Wyche returned to North Carolina and became matron of the state's first training school for nurses at Rex Hospital. Wyche is the most well-known historical nursing figure presented in this book and a historian in her own right with the posthumous publication of her book The History of Nursing in North Carolina (1938).1 Not only was Wyche the first nursing school matron in North Carolina, but she was also the founder and president of the state nurses' association, the first all-women's professional organization in North Carolina. In addition, Wyche was the champion for the first nurse registration legislation in the United States passed by North Carolina in 1903. Pollitt introduces us to the first White and African American nurses who took advantage of this legislation, becoming the first registered nurses in the United States. Pollitt argues that despite the weak, nonmandatory registration law, it was nonetheless an important achievement for the professionalization of nursing. Pollitt weaves this concept of professionalization through education, training, and scope of nursing practice as a central theme throughout each chapter of this book.Next, Pollitt presents the emerging nursing specialties of the early twentieth century including public health, school nursing, insurance nursing, and military nursing (from the Spanish-American War through the Korean War). Then, in Chapters 4 and 5, she considers how public funding in the 1920s and 1930s, with the Shepard-Towner Act and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs, supported and expanded services delivered by nurses across the state. This is one of the most interesting sections of the book because it tells the story of North Carolina's first Native American registered nurse, Lula Owl Gloyne. Pollitt rescued the powerful story of Gloyne from obscurity by unearthing local interview transcripts and oral histories recorded by Gloyne and other Cherokee Native Americans in the early 1980s. …