In 1873 Linda Richards became America's first graduate nurse. Fighting ignorance and prejudice, she revolutionized medical care in hospitals and instituted reforms which brought her international fame.

Linda's dedication to nursing started early. At ten, on a Vermont farm, she battled valiantly for her mother's life. She tended anyone who needed her, riding with old Dr. Currier on his rounds and astonishing neighbors with a skill far beyond her years. She had an uncanny wisdom in caring for the sick and longed to become a professional nurse. But there was no training available and so she became a school teacher. When the Civil War was over, she planned to marry George Poole who had enlisted with the heroic Green Mountain Boys.

George returned, but he was too ill to marry and Linda nursed him for five heartbreaking years. When he died, her life seemed barren until she entered America's first nursing school at Roxbury, Massachusetts, and became its first graduate. She accepted the post of night superintendent at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and was horrified by the primitive conditions. "Nurses" were drunken vagrants forced by the police to serve sentences as ward attendants. Linda herself cared for her patients, working without adequate heat or gaslight. Patiently, stubbornly, she instilled in her workers humane practices that raised the standards of nursing.  She went to England where she met her heroine, Florence Nightingale, and studied her nursing methods. In conflict with rigid tradition and strange customs, she spent five fascinating years in Japan training their first professional nurses.

Linda Richards lived to see her controversial ideas become accepted medical practice.  She inspired thousands of trained nurses on the battlefields of World War I. She lived with devotion and limitless sympathy. "Nursing with the hands," she said, "means less than nursing with the heart."

Here is another superb biography by Rachel Baker of a gallant woman in the field of medicine.

From the dust jacket