National Nurses United

Disagreement over what MCHR should be doing led to conflicts between chapters and the national office, infighting among leader- ship, poor organizational structure, and general instability. At one point, in 1966, a number of key staff, including executive director Johnny Parham, resigns. "I did discover—and probably discovered too late—that you have a lot of egos among physicians," the book quotes him as remembering. A friend later writes him that what he had not be able to do is "soothe the anxieties, fulfill the desire for status and power, and be both a papa and a puppet to a thousand physicians." Though physicians obviously played a huge role in the formation and work of MCHR, including giants such as Bob Smith, Walter Lear, Aaron Shirley, Jack Geiger, Alvin Poussaint, Des Callan, June Finer, Tom Levin, and Quentin Young, Dittmer also spends a fair number of pages in the book detailing the work of white and black MCHR regis- tered nurses. We learn about Phyllis Cunningham, Josephine Disparti, Patricia Weatherly, Helene Richardson, and Jeanette Badger. These nurses mainly staffed the organization's southern programs, and were fierce advocates for public health and the communities in which they lived. They treated, they educated, they informed, they made home visits, they set up "health careers clubs" to recruit young local people to the medical professions, they continued to document medical segrega- tion, they involved and empowered local residents to have a greater say over their own health needs and proposed programs. When MCHR as an organization was out of funds and its structure in disarray, Dittmer writes that "in the end it was the nurses who sacrificed and pleaded to keep MCHR's southern project alive. Since the fall of 1964 this ded- icated group of health care activists had been responsible for most of the Medical Committee's success in the South." I felt a bit of trepidation when I first picked up this book because it is dense and packed with numbers, names, and details. But Dittmer does a good job of storytelling, introducing characters and giving enough context when he is backtracking in time—since many of these events were happening simultaneously. The work of MCHR struck me as very similar to National Nurses United's Registered Nurse Response Network (RNRN) project, under which nurses have provided first aid to protesters at various demonstrations and events, such as the Occupy encampments. Though MCHR exists no more, unions such as NNU carry on this proud tradition of medical professionals not simply providing medi- cal care, but fighting as activists for systemic and structural changes to make a truly healthy society. —Lucia Hwang The Language of Kindness: A Nurse's Story By Christie Watson, RN; Tim Duggan Books for any nurse who has wished that Lena Dunham (or if you are a bit older, Jean Kerr) was doing a play by play of her life, Christie Watson's The Lan- guage of Kindness: A Nurse's Story may fill that order. Watson has an eye for tiny details, a relentlessly self-dep- recating humor, and a firm grasp on nursing history. As Watson spells it out, The Language of Kindness is a close-up look at nursing inside Eng- land's National Health Service (NHS). Watson does exactly what she promises and more in this 321-page personal memoir covering her more than 20-year nursing career. She explains how teenage pride kept her from returning home after a failed relationship, so at 16, she fell into her first caregiving position as a live-in counselor for severely disabled adults. "It was the first time I felt that I was doing something worthwhile," writes Watson. It was the purpose she found at that job which propelled her towards (and kept her in) nursing, a decision that was met with skepticism by her parents. "My dad actually laughed out loud," she writes of his reaction. Watson too had her own doubts when, during the first days of nursing school, she faints at the sight of her own blood. Watson proves herself to be an adept storyteller who allows us to feel the fears of a novice nurse entrusted with the lives of others, whose first attempt to perform an intramuscular injection results in a needle break and a tearful meltdown. We are there when Watson shows up for her first day in a psychiatric ward. There she follows her supervising nurse on a tour, replete with stern reminders to read patient files and keep all medicines locked at all times. It is only after Watson's mentor warns her "they put kryptonite in the water" that Watson realizes her "supervising nurse" is actually a patient. Watson paints a clear picture of life in different hospital wards and settings. She describes the difficulty scrub nurses face with- standing the heat of an operating room, on their feet for hours anticipating a surgeon's needs, and perfecting a quick duck should a frustrated surgeon toss a surgical instrument their way. Neonatal nurses, she observes, are seemingly indefatigable, excellent at multitasking and adept at mind-bending computations under the most stressful circumstances. Consider the sleep- deprived nurse, she explains, who must solve the following equat- ion: "The baby weighs 1.697 kg, has an IV of Dopamine 40 mg in 50 ml. What will the IV infusion rate be set at, to deliver 12.5 mcg/kg/min?" For each department and specialty, Watson strives to answer the questions, "What is necessary to do what nursing job?" and "Who is best suited for each position?" You walk away with a sense of where you might best find your place as a nurse in the hos- pital setting. Throughout the book, Watson returns over and over again to two central questions, what is nursing and what makes a good nurse? The act of nursing, is "somewhere between science and art, it is about the smallest details and understanding how they make the biggest difference." On some days it seems nursing is following Florence Nightin- gale's dictum, "the greater part of nursing consists of preserving cleanliness." Indeed, there are plenty of bodily fluids in Watson's tale, "I spend my time wiping blood of a wall; soaking off rock-solid dried poo from a baby's back and neck." Watson describes the importance of a calm expression in the face of all things sticky, oozy, smelly, or frightening. "Nurses make good poker players," she explains, noting it is necessary that nurses mask their emotions to protect their patients. "The horror of our bodies—our humanity, flesh and blood—is something nurses must bear, lest the patient think too deeply, remember the lack of dignity that makes us all vulnerable. It is our vulnerability that unites us. Promoting dignity in the face of illness is one of the best gifts a nurse can give." According to Watson, history tells us that "sympathy, compassion, empathy" make a good nurse. Nurses, she writes, spend "a lot of time trying to change the focus of bad things by introducing hope, comfort, and kindness." J U LY | A U G U S T | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G N A T I O N A L N U R S E 17

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