Abstract
Reviewed by: Tales From Kentucky Nurses by William Lynwood Montell Dana Johnson Tales From Kentucky Nurses. By William Lynwood Montell. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. Pp. 281.) In a career spanning more than four decades, William Lynwood Montell, professor emeritus of folk studies at Western Kentucky University, has produced numerous works of local history and regional interest. Earlier in his career, Montell focused on the use of oral history and folklore studies methods to illuminate previously unstudied historical events. Since his retirement in 2000, his interest has shifted to producing works that convey stories “about local life and culture relative to professional groups and subregional areas” (1). In his most recent work, Tales From Kentucky Nurses, Montell continues in this vein, providing the reader with a diverse collection of tales about nursing and nurses in Kentucky. For this book, Montell includes stories he collected from Kentucky nurses and anecdotes extracted from oral history interviews conducted by the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky. These stories span from the 1920s until the early 2000s, with the majority occurring within the past thirty years. The stories were obtained from across Kentucky, but the collection clearly focuses on rural nursing experiences, with less than 10 percent of the material obtained from urban (Louisville or Lexington) medical settings. Nearly one-third of the stories are from Leslie County’s iconic Frontier Nursing Service, reflecting the rural focus of this volume. The book is organized into eleven sections, covering a wide range of topics, including (among others) emergency-room episodes, inspirational tales, doctors and nurse interns, and government and business issues. Each section is prefaced with a short introduction, but the appeal and substance of this book rests in the stories themselves. Indeed, Montell hopes that these stories will encourage other professionals to record their own stories in an effort to “provide an important insight into Kentucky’s cultural legacy” (3). The stories span the gamut from tragedy to comedy, revealing the diverse emotions evoked by the practice of nursing. Although many of the stories have happy or humorous endings, Montell does not avoid the tragic aspects of nursing and medical practice. In his commentary and from the stories he chose for inclusion the author reveals his respect and admiration for nurses and the difficult and necessary work they perform. Montell identifies his intended audience as “historians, educators, medical professionals and residents across the state of Kentucky” (3). He is only partially successful in meeting this goal. Although this work seems appropriate for a general audience searching for a readable and entertaining account of nursing in Kentucky, the stories lack the context necessary to make them useful to historians and educators. The oral history excerpts, in particular, are [End Page 100] short anecdotes extracted from much longer and more complex and nuanced interviews. Historians, in particular, would be better served by reading the actual interviews in their entirety. For readers interested in the history of nursing in the commonwealth, Professional Nursing in Kentucky: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow provides a historical overview of the development of the nursing profession in Kentucky, and Melanie Goan’s Mary Breckinridge: The Frontier Nursing Service and Rural Health in Appalachia contextualizes and examines the creation and operation of the Frontier Nursing Service. Dana Johnson University of Kentucky Copyright © 2015 West Virginia University Press
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