Saints for Nurses

For nurses, and for anyone who looks after the sick. Twenty chapters, each on one thing the work does to you: nothing left to give, the patient who dies, the night shift, pain you cannot take away, a system that will not let you care well, being talked over, the hostile patient, the patient who hurts you, the mistake that keeps you awake, the dying child, dementia, addiction, the mess of the body, your own body breaking, doubt, never resting, births, other people's fear, hard coworkers, and whether any of it counts. Each chapter gives three people who lived it, sixty in all. Camillus de Lellis, a gambler with a leg wound that never healed, who founded a nursing order. Teresa of Calcutta, who tended the dying for decades while feeling nothing. Marianne Cope, whose strict hygiene kept every one of her sisters free of leprosy on Molokai. Mark Ji Tianxiang, the doctor who never beat opium. Every entry has a question to ask, the life told plainly, and one line to keep. The book says more than once that being assaulted is not part of the job, and that rest is allowed. A toolkit at the back sorts all sixty by what you are facing on this shift. You do not have to be Catholic to use it.

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