National Nurses United

Books_FNL with art 8/20/10 4:05 PM Page 20 "treatment" called diethylstilbestrol, also known as DES, that could suppress a child's growth to a more socially acceptable height, many parents flocked to their daughter's doctors hoping to capitalize on the latest medical breakthrough. DES, a synthetic estrogen, would stunt the growth of young girls by accelerating puberty, thus allowing their bodies less time to grow. Although DES was not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for this use, worried parents had no trouble finding doctors, many of them pediatric endocrinologists affiliated with prestigious teaching institutions, who would treat their daughters with the hormone. While some in the medical community casted doubt on the safety of DES, and raised ethical questions surrounding the notion of treating tallness as a medical condition, thousands of young girls across the globe were prescribed heavy doses of DES. Many of them suffered both short- and long-term side effects from the hormone, and eventually a clear link between DES and cancer emerged. Still, the medical establishment continued to offer DES for tall girls, and, sadly, their parents readily accepted. Cohen and Cosgrove also chronicle the history of the development and use of human growth hormone to spur growth in short boys. The authors detail the painstaking efforts by physicians and chemists to harvest human growth hormone (hGH) from the pituitary glands of cadavers during the late 1950s and early 60s to treat children with dwarfism. A lack of quality control in the processing of hGH afflicted some treated with the hormone with a dementia-like condition called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Others developed antibodies to the hormone that in some cases decreased growth rates. However, as with DES, these dangerous and deadly side effects did not stop the industry from its quest to find a cure for short stature. The 1980s gave rise to the development of synthetic hGH, which could be used not only to treat dwarfism, but also to boost the height of healthy children. Pharmaceutical manufacturers of the new "therapy" argued that it was equally as justifiable for parents to want to Celebrating Nurses: A Visual History By Christine Hallett, RN, Ph.D; Barron's t first glance, Celebrating Nurses looks like an oversized coffee table book, filled with beautiful black-and-white and color photos, illustrations, and other images of nurses and their practice. The book holds merit for just the images alone; it's hard to find in one place so many depictions of nursing spanning so many centuries and countries. These range from photos to oil paintings to commercial advertisements. Our resident designer clapped her hands in glee to find such large reproductions of historical nursing images she had viewed before only as tiny thumbnails on the Internet. But if you read in between the pictures, you'll find that British RN Christine Hallett also provides a rich overview of the evolution of nursing from ancient and medieval times, through early modern times, to the 19th and 20th centuries. Nurses in early societies were women healers, then became connected to religious orders, and eventually professionalized through nursing schools and registration (licensing). What's nice about Hallett's explanation is that she not only correlates the development of nursing with the rise of modern medicine, industrialization, and various wars, she covers nursing in Europe, the Americas, Australia, and beyond. In every chapter are short profiles of notable nurses. Of course she describes Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton, but Hallett also includes public health nurse Lillian Wald, frontier nurse Mary Breckinridge, and birth control crusader Margaret Sanger. Predictably, Hallett does not mention the important role of nursing unions such as the California Nurses Association, UNISON in the United Kingdom, or the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions in the history of the profession but, sadly, it is not that kind of book. —Lucia Hwang A 20 N AT I O N A L N U R S E 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 J U LY | A U G U S T 2 0 1 0

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