Compassion mixed with equal doses of technical competence and good humor has enabled Irish nurses to help generations of American patients. Nurses were Ireland’s biggest export in the late 1980s when Anne Kelly finished her five years of training, first as a nurse and then as a midwife. “The job situation at home was bad and everyone was going somewhere else,” she … [Read more...] about An Irish Tradition: Nursing
Issues
Hospital Nuns: From the Civil War to Today
From the Civil War to Chicago’s Mercy Hospital, the extraordinary history of Irish nuns in health care. The Sisters of Mercy were the first women to go with Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War in 1854. They worked with her to make nursing more effective and to improve sanitary conditions. In America, the Sisters of Mercy would make their impact on the battlefields in … [Read more...] about Hospital Nuns: From the Civil War to Today
A Way of Healing
In memory of her brother David, who died of of MS related causes, Honora Harty flew from San Francisco to Dublin to join a group of MS Ireland walkers embarking on the Camino de Santiago (the Way of St. James), the ancient pilgrimage route. The walkers picked up the trail in Estella in northeast Spain and walked to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia on the west … [Read more...] about A Way of Healing
What Are You Like?
Mary Roach
An acclaimed, adventurous and hilarious science writer known for her fearless, approachable style and delightful footnotes, Mary Roach is the author of such best-selling and award-winning books as Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005), Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008), and Packing for Mars: The Curious … [Read more...] about What Are You Like?
Mary Roach
A World to Care For
Mary Manning Walsh, a nursing home for the elderly, proves that the twilight years can be joyful if the people in charge really care. The massive stroke that left my mother speechless and paralyzed also left her family despondent. Having a stroke had always been her greatest fear, and now, somewhere in the mists of her intelligent mind, she understood that the terrible thing … [Read more...] about A World to Care For