Mandated by the Affordable Care Act, public health demonstration projects have been touted as an innovative solution to the nation’s health care crisis. Yet, such projects actually have a long but little-known history, dating back to the 1920s. This groundbreaking new book reveals the key role that these local health programs—and the nurses who ran them—influenced how Americans perceived both their personal health choices and the well-being of their communities. 

 

Nursing with a Message transports readers to New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, charting the rise and fall of two community health centers, in the neighborhoods of East Harlem and Bellevue-Yorkville. Award-winning historian Patricia D’Antonio examines the day-to-day operations of these clinics, as well as the community outreach work done by nurses who visited schools, churches, and homes encouraging neighborhood residents to adopt healthier lifestyles, engage with preventive physical exams, and see to the health of their preschool children. As she reveals, these programs relied upon an often-contentious and fragile alliance between various healthcare providers, educators, social workers, and funding agencies, both public and private. Assessing both the successes and failures of these public health demonstration projects, D’Antonio also traces their legacy in shaping both the best and worst elements of today’s primary care system. 

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition.
Download the open access ebook here.

 

PATRICIA D’ANTONIO is the Killebrew-Censits Endowed Term Professor of Nursing, the director of the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, and the chair of the department of Family and Community Health at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in Philadelphia. She is core faculty of the Alice Paul Center and a senior fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the editor of the Nursing History Review and the author of American Nursing: A History of Knowledge, Authority, and the Meaning of Work, which won the 2011 Lavinia Dock Award.

— Jennifer Gunn, Program in the History of Medicine, University of Minnesota

— Bulletin of the History of Medicine

"With clarity and historical sophistication, D'Antonio has identified a crucial hiatus in our historical knowledge. This is definitely a timely and important book."

— Susan M. Reverby, author of Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy