Starched Caps: A Nurse’s Memoir

It was the summer of 1960. Elvis Presley had recently been discharged from the Army and had a number one hit, “Stuck on You.” John Fitzgerald Kennedy was running for president. Gasoline cost thirty-one cents a gallon. And author Nancy Swan White had just completed a two-week nursing-aide course; at age sixteen she was ready to start her first job in a hospital. It was a career that would last forty-five years. In Starched Caps, she shares an entertaining and moving memoir of the training and career of a nurse, chronicling a wide range of experiences in school and on the job. She provides vivid pictures of what it was like to be a nurse as well as how much the medical world has changed since she entered the field. Starched Caps offers glimpses of the cultural and political climate of those years, from the stereotypical attitudes and assumptions related to the deep racial divide that existed in the United States, to the almost nonexistent role of male nurses.