False Dawn

The Rise and Decline of Public Health Nursing

By Karen Buhler-Wilkerson; Foreword by Susan M. Reverby and Julie A. Fairman

SERIES: Critical Issues in Health and Medicine

Rutgers University Press

Since its initial publication in 1989 by Garland Publishing, Karen Buhler Wilkerson’s False Dawn: The Rise and Decline of Public Health Nursing remains the definitive work on the creation, work, successes, and failures of public health nursing in the United States. False Dawn explores and answers the provocative question: why did a movement that became a significant vehicle for the delivery of comprehensive health care to individuals and families fail to reach its potential? Through carefully researched chapters, Wilkerson details what she herself called the “rise and fall” narrative of public health nursing: rising to great heights in its patients' homes in the struggle to control infectious diseases, assimilate immigrants, and tame urban areas -- only to flounder during the later growth of hospitals, significant immigration restrictions, and the emergence of chronic diseases as endemic in American society.

Karen Buhler Wilkerson’s False Dawn has never been surpassed as the authoritative text on the history of public health nursing in the United States. This new edition, with a new introduction by two of the leading historians of nursing and with an updated bibliography, fills a critical gap in this literature.' Rima D. Apple, Vilas Life Cycle Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Madison

KAREN BUHLER-WILKERSON (1944-2010) was professor emerita, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and director emerita of the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing.

JULIE A. FAIRMAN, PhD, RN is the Nightingale Professor in honor of Nursing Veterans at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and chair of the Biobehavorial Health Sciences Department.

SUSAN M. REVERBY is the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She is also an historian of American women, medicine and nursing.

Foreword: Can there be a New Dawn for Public Health Nursing? by Susan Reverby and Julie A. Fairman
Preface
1          Trained Nurses for the Sick Poor: Care, Cleanliness and Character
2          Creating Their Own Domain: Ladies, Nurses and the Sick Poor
3          The Hope and Promise of Public Health
4          Preserving the Treasures of their Tradition: The Founding of the National Organization for Public Health Nursing and the Red Cross Rural Nursing Service
5          The Decline of Public Health Nursing: Economical and Pragmatic, but No Longer Necessary
6          Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index

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