Paul E. Stepansky, Easing Pain on the Western Front: American Nurses of the Great War and the Birth of Modern Nursing Practice

Abstract

In this accessible and stimulating book, Paul Stepansky attempts to do for American nursing what Christine Hallett achieved with her accounts of British nurses in World War I. Drawing on primary sources — letters and journals of American nurses and their colleagues — his endeavor is partly to try to locate the roots of modern advancements in nursing practice. This he achieves by focusing on the main aspects of nursing in WWI. Easing Pain on the Western Front dives into the fundamental tenets of nursing practice, topics that are still debated and discussed a century later — the nature of caring, the importance of touch, the therapeutic role, the relationship with the medical profession, the provision of “total” care, and a “safe” pair of hands. Stepansky achieves this through an impressively broad exploration of different aspects of wartime nursing which have been organized into thematic chapters enabling identification of these practices in a developmental context.