Nurses: The Inside Story of the Nursing Profession

Nurses now, just as when this book was originally published in 1988, are underpaid and overworked and thousands are leaving the profession every year. But why do many more highly intelligent and well-educated men and women stick to such a difficult and ill-paid job? Donald Gould has tried to discover the answer to this question by interviewing all kinds of nurses. For most the many frustrations and hardships of their jobs are more than out weighted by the immense satisfactions of the daily round. As the stories told in Nurses reveal, the profession provides an opportunity for the exercise of every kind of talent, from the highly scientific skills demanded by intensive care, to ’making do’ in remote Africa, from easing the approach to death to managing a workforce of thousands.

Donald Gould (1919-2002) qualified as a doctor fromSt. Thomas’s Medical School in 1942. After war service in the RNVR he took a degree in physiology nad became an academic and Professor Physiology at the University of Malaya in Singapore and a senior lecturer at Barts. He was editor of World Medicine and New Scientist and was medcial correspondent for the New Statesman.