This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

An analysis of the efforts of American nurses to establish nursing as an academic discipline and nurses as valued researchers in the decades after World War II.

Nurses represent the largest segment of the U.S. health care workforce and spend significantly more time with patients than any other member of the health care team. Dr. Nurse probes their history to examine major changes that have taken place in American health care in the second half of the twentieth century. The book reveals how federal and state health and higher education policies shaped education within health professions after World War II.

Starting in the 1950s, academic nurses sought to construct a science of nursing—distinct from that of the related biomedical or behavioral sciences—that would provide the basis for nursing practice. Their efforts transformed nursing’s labor into a valuable site of knowledge production and proved how the application of their knowledge was integral to improving patient outcomes. Exploring the knowledge claims, strategies, and politics involved as academic nurses negotiated their roles and nursing’s future, Dr. Nurse highlights how state-supported health centers have profoundly shaped nursing education and health care delivery. 

Dominique A. Tobbell is the Centennial Distinguished Professor of Nursing and director of the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry at the University of Virginia. She is coeditor of Global Health and Pharmacology and the author of several books, including Pills, Power, and Policy: The Struggle for Drug Reform in Cold War America and its Consequences.

Introduction
1. The Need for Educational Reform
2. The Making of Nursing Science
3. Nursing in the Postwar Research University
4. “Nursepower”: States and the Politics of Nursing and Health Care in the 1970s
5. Academics in the Clinic
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Archives and Collections
Closing Notes