A History of Professional Nursing in North Carolina, 1902-2002 is the first comprehensive exploration of nursing history in the state since 1938. The scholarship on the history of health, illness, medicine, and public health is largely either physician-centered or focuses on specific health care institutions. The history of nursing has been comparatively ignored. Nursing's emergence as a profession in the early twentieth century and the influence nursing has had on the quality of life of virtually every resident and every health care institution in North Carolina in its first 100 years is a compelling story.Nursing is an occupation and role that touches everyone. Most people are related to nurses; virtually everyone has received care from nurses. Yet, they tend to be somewhat invisible. The individual experiences of nurses and the unique development of nursing organizations, education, and practice have received scant attention from scholars. This book enhances the historical record by recounting the triumphs of individual nurses and the political and professional successes and failures professional nursing has experienced in its first century.This book is unique in its inclusion of accounts of and from African American, Cherokee, and male nurses. Readers interested in the histories of North Carolina and its counties, health care, labor, professionalization, education, and the expansion of women's roles in society should find this book thought-provoking.