Main description:

The 18th volume in the Working Americans series focuses on health care workers from 1880 to 2022. As many of us saw during the COVID pandemic, health care workers are a vital part of our community. Our health care workers spent tireless hours caring for the sick, comforted their loved ones, created needed health care protocols, and developed vaccines, all in an effort to keep our communities safe. This new resource looks, decade by decade, at how the health care community has developed over these many years, and how many aspects of health care work has stayed the same. From the stories of early healers and travelling doctors on the frontier, to accounts of the highly trained doctors and nurses of today, readers will be introduced to the work they did, the types of patients they cared for, the treatments and medicines they had in their medicine bag, their family life and family finances, and what was going on in health and medicine during their time. From the wealth of government surveys, social worker histories, economic data, family diaries and letters, newspaper and magazine features, this unique reference assembles a remarkably personal and realistic look at the lives of American health care workers, to shine a light on how important this profession is to their community.