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DATE: 1943

LENGTH: 7 min

CATEGORY: Educational & Instructional, Sound, Black & White

DIRECTOR: Unidentified

PRODUCER/PUBLISHER: U.S. Army, adapted from a film by the Chicago Film Laboratory for U.S. Navy

Summary

Historian David Cantor looks at five films about nursing produced between the 1940s and 1970s. In the mid-20th century, American nursing leaders produced and deployed the motion picture as a modern tool of education, training, and recruitment. Hundreds of films were made, including informational, newsreel, and training movies for a variety of audiences. Evening Care demonstrates the recommended nighttime routine in a ship’s sick bay, as nursing corpsmen help sick and injured sailors relax and prepare to sleep. They wash the patients, rub backs, change dressings, and offer up a girlie magazine as “homework.”….Read The Essay

Warning: These films contain explicit images of disease and intrusive medical treatment. Viewer discretion advised.

Supplementary Materials

Stills from Evening Care


Other Films Featured in the Essay “Screening the Nurse: Film, Fear, and Narrative from the 1940s to the 1970s”


In the Collections of the National Library of Medicine

NLM Historical Audiovisuals Collection

A young woman in a Nursing uniform looks concerned.T.B. Nurse Wallace, 1952: A dramatization of the arrival and settling-in of a newly-minted nurse at a tuberculosis sanitarium.

Career, ca.1958: The story of three Native American women attending the U.S. Public Health Service Indian School of Practical Nursing in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The Nurse Combats Disease, 1962: With the aid of drawings, this film describes the nurse’s role in the prevention of disease, with emphasis on factors that lead to disease transmission and how to interrupt that chain.

NLM Prints & Photographs Collection

A military nurse reading the newspaper to an officer.See thousands of postcards with nursing themes donated to NLM by Michael Zwerdling.

View the related online exhibition Pictures of Nursing: the Zwerdling Postcard Collection.

NLM Rare Book Collection

Tradition and Destiny of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, ca. 1949 is a detailed, illustrated, 52 page booklet about all aspects of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps.

States regularly issued guides and manuals for public health nurses, such as this Manual for Public Health Nurses, from the state of Iowa in the late 1940s.


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Florence Nightingale: The Mother of Nursing, 2015

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The Importance of Nursing Research, 2009

PubMed for Nurses

This brief tutorial, designed specifically for nurses, provides an introduction to searching the biomedical journal literature using PubMed.

Circulating Now: The Blog of the NLM History of Medicine Division

People carry a patient on a cot out of a house, a nurse with an infant follows.
The Lady Who Became a Nurse

The Forgotten Frontier: Nursing Done in Wild Places

How to Become a Nurse and How to Succeed, ca. 1892

Faye Glenn Abdellah: Nurse, Officer, Educator

Nurses on the Cutting Edge


External Resources

National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) — Est. 1986

The mission of the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) is to promote and improve the health of individuals, families, communities, and populations. NINR supports and conducts clinical and basic research and research training on health and illness across the lifespan to build the scientific foundation for clinical practice, prevent disease and disability, manage and eliminate symptoms caused by illness, and improve palliative and end-of-life care.

NIH Library Subject Guide: Nursing

This guide provides access to nursing, biomedical, clinical trial, evidence based practice, and research instrument databases; drug and pharmaceutical resources; e-books; patient education resources; and professional societies of special interest to NIH Clinical Center and IC nurses.

Nursing at the NIH Clinical Center

Clinical Research Nursing is nursing practice with a specialty focus on clinical research. It includes care provided to research participants, as well as activities to support protocol implementation, data collection and research participant protection.  In addition to providing and coordinating clinical care, clinical research nurses have a central role in assuring ongoing maintenance of informed consent, integrity of protocol procedures and accuracy of research data collection.

Posted by:Circulating Now

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