THE NAKED CITY

A nurse and educator recounts a vibrant career in this memoir featuring colorful vignettes.

When a friend and colleague suggested to Rosdahl that she write down the stories from her long and varied nursing career, the author was skeptical that her life would be of interest to readers. But she took up the challenge and gathered a wealth of anecdotes, case studies, and vivid history for an eclectic and compelling narrative of a career in a dynamic field. Author Joan Holman’s foreword gives an overview of Rosdahl’s pioneering work in the education of nurses, including writing a bestselling nursing text and introducing measurable learning objectives that continue to be used today. The bones of this brief biography are fleshed out enthusiastically in Rosdahl’s chronologically organized series of sketches that follow. Starting her career at age 16 in the 1950s, the author broke barriers in nursing and nursing education, including working for 40 cents an hour as the only Protestant nursing assistant in a Roman Catholic hospital, overcoming institutional resistance to become the first nonteaching high school counselor in Minnesota, and launching one of the first accredited practical nursing programs in that state. Stories such as “Being an “O.W.,” about the former stigma of out-of-wedlock pregnancy; “Heating Up Pizza,” in which student nurses heat leftovers in an operating room autoclave; and “Women in the Marching Band,” about gender barriers for female musicians, ground the narrative in Rosdahl’s personal experiences. The result is an accessible history of modern nursing, narrated with the concise clarity of a born teacher who can’t resist sharing an intriguing fact. The author’s tone is charmingly candid and coolly competent, whether she is flipping a would-be attacker on his back or handling a supervisor’s prim sputtering about an instructor’s pregnancy with a terse “I think I will just wait. I believe it will go away.” Occasionally, this frankness becomes a bit off-putting, as when a frequently pregnant, impoverished woman’s underwear is described as “a dirty, greasy bra.” It is also disappointing to find quotes from Wikipedia in the text rather than better researched information. Still, overall, the absorbing book is a warm and fitting tribute to the nurses and nursing educators to whom it is dedicated.

An engrossing and personal look at the evolution of the field of nursing.