Soviet Nightingales: Care Under Communism

In Soviet Nightingales, Susan Grant tracks the origins of nursing care in the nineteenth century through the end of the Soviet state. With the advent of the USSR, nurses were instrumental in helping to build the New Soviet Person and in constructing a socialist society.

Disease and illness were rampant in the early 1920s after years of war, revolution, and famine. The demand for nurses was great, but how might these workers best serve the country's needs? By examining living and working conditions, nurse-patient relations, education, and attempts at international nursing cooperation, Grant recounts the history of the Bolshevik effort to define the Soviet nurse and organize a new system of socialist care for the masses. Although the Bolsheviks aimed to transform health care along socialist lines, they ultimately failed as the struggle to train skilled medical workers became entangled in politics. Soviet Nightingales draws on rich archival research from Russia, the United States, and Britain to limn how ideology reinvented the role of the nurse and shaped the profession.