Military Nurse

Her life has been wonderfully fictionalized on the hit PBS TV series, Mercy Street. Here is Mary Phinney's real life in her own words, long prized by historians as a source about Civil War medicine. American Mary Phinney was ahead of her time. A rebel against the restrictions placed on women of her day, the sad death of her husband, the Barron von Olnhausen, proved to be the real beginning of her life. Upon the outbreak of the American Civil War, this remarkable woman enlisted herself in the care of sick and wounded soldiers. Working with Dorothea Dix and other notable women of the Civil War, she tirelessly worked to improve the sanitary conditions, medical care, and morale of shattered young men.

In World War II, 59,000 women voluntarily risked their lives for their country as US Army nurses. For more than half a century these women's experiences remained untold, almost without reference in books, historical societies, or military archives. After years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews, Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee have created a dramatic narrative that at last brings to light the critical role that women played throughout the war.

They save our lives every day, and we’ve never heard their stories. Experience the life-or-death intensity of working on the front lines, in this important book putting a spotlight on America’s greatest unsung heroes. Around the clock, across the country, these highly skilled and...

Lynda Van Devanter was the girl next door, the cheerleader who went to Catholic schools, enjoyed sports, and got along well with her four sisters and parents. After high school she attended nursing school and then did something that would shatter her secure world for the rest of her life: in 1969, she joined the army and was shipped to Vietnam. When she arrived in Vietnam her idealistic view of the war vanished quickly. She worked long hours in cramped, ill-equipped, understaffed operating rooms. She saw friends die.

One cheating husband’s wife is another man’s treasure. It’s the beginning of autumn when Kenya Hamilton’s husband decides to break the news to his wife that he’s been unhappy in their marriage and wants to leave. Meanwhile, at insurance adjustor Kevin Hayes’s house, his wife Lindsey unexpectedly leaves him for Cecil Hamilton, a black man, and fellow U.S. Marine. After his car is mistakenly vandalized, Kevin tracks down the perpetrator who happens to be Kenya, the other man’s wife. Kevin finds an unexpected source of solace in Kenya, and eventually, sparks fly between the two. ...

A month after her 24th birthday, Lt. Mary Elizabeth Balster collapses among the rubble of a shelled supply room. On the night of November 30, 1944, holed up in the Heinrich Himmler Barracks in Morhange, France, Lt. Balster's evac receives a typical patient load, but this time one of the admissions is a 19-year-old tanker she'd nursed back to health five months before in Normandy. The charge nurse on Surgical gently informs the lieutenant that the private is critical.

What is the price of honor? It took 10 years for Vietnam War Nurse Diane Carlson Evans to answer that question - and the answer was a heavy one.

Soon after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, they also attacked U.S. military installations in the Philippines. For the army and navy nurses stationed there, what had been a peaceful outpost quickly turned into a raging war zone. When the U.S. and Philippine forces retreated to the Bataan Peninsula and the fortress island of Corregidor, the nurses followed them to the field hospitals to care for the wounded. Persevering through enemy assault and imprisonment, these heroic women became angels of mercy amid the war in the Pacific.

The harrowing, dramatic and profoundly moving story of the Australian and New Zealand nurses who served in the Great War. Now a major six-part television series. By the end of the Great War, 45 Australian and New Zealand nurses had died on overseas service and over 200 had been decorated. These were the women who left for war looking for adventure and romance but were soon confronted with challenges for which their civilian lives could never have prepared them.

Weaving together information from official sources and personal interviews, Barbara Tomblin gives the first full-length account of the US Army Nurse Corps in the Second World War. She describes how over 60,000 army nurses, all volunteers, cared for sick and wounded American soldiers in every theater of the war, serving in the jungles of the Southwest Pacific, the frozen reaches of Alaska and Iceland, the mud of Italy and northern Europe, or the heat and dust of the Middle East.

Superintendent of Nurses Julia Stimson must recruit 64 nurses to relieve the battle-worn British, months before American troops are ready to be deployed. She knows the young nurses serving near the front lines will face a challenging situation, but nothing could have prepared her for the difficulties that await when they arrive at British Base Hospital 12 in Rouen, France. The primitive conditions, a convoluted supply system, and horrific battle wounds are enough to discourage the most hardened nurses, and Julia can do nothing but lead by example.

When she was 18, she joined the army to finance her nursing education. With less than six months of nursing experience, she was assigned to the 24th Evacuation Hospital in South Vietnam. True tales of the war that are by turns horrifying and humorous, told with an eye for detail, by a woman who was in the thick of it.

Our Mothers' War is an eye-opening and moving portrait of women during World War II, a war that forever transformed the way women participate in American society. Never before has the vast range of women's experiences during this pivotal era been brought together in one book.

Corporal Scott Grey is drawn into a never-ending war in the past. He’s a military nurse, desperate to find peace with his fiancé, Naomi, a fellow army medic. But he is haunted by his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is still recovering in Aldershot from a serious head injury that affects him physically and emotionally, when one unsettled night a ghost nurse, a Grey Lady, from World War I, takes him back to the horrors of the trenches, and shares her story of loss. He’s not sure if she’s real or just a manifestation of the head injury. But when she pulls him back in time to her...

Drawing upon evidence from archives across the world, Veiled Warriors offers a compelling account of nurses' wartime experiences and a clear appraisal of their work and its contribution to the allied cause between 1914 and 1918, on both the Western and the Eastern Fronts. Nurses believed they were involved in a multi-layered battle. Primarily, they were fighting for the lives of their patients on the "second battlefield" of casualty clearing stations, transports, and military hospitals.

A heartwarming, emotional romance about a wounded veteran, a grieving nurse, and the love that gives them both a second chance. Daniel Reid came home from war with one leg, a lifetime of guilt, and no hope for the future. He checks into a coastal rehabilitation clinic expecting nothing more than routine care and quiet isolation. Olivia Carter is the nurse assigned to his case. She’s still grieving the loss of her fiancé and hiding behind professional smiles. But something about Daniel—his silence, his pain, his stubborn courage—pulls her in. What begins as guarded conversations and ...

In 1967, when lieutenant Sandy O'Connell begins nursing on an Air Force base in America's heartland, a dying pilot tells her, "Laggards come home from war with stories to tell; true heroes are rendered speechless." Little does Sandy know that she will soon become one of the silent few. Falling into the exciting social life of a fighter pilot training base, Sandy struggles to stay true to her small town values as her friends fly off to war. Flight nurse Penny obtains a front row seat to the Tet Offensive while Kate, a senator's daughter, falls into the party scene on the China Sea, and ...

More than 100 US Army and Navy nurses were stationed in Guam and the Philippines at the beginning of World War II. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, five navy nurses on Guam became the first American military women of World War II to be taken prisoner by the Japanese. More than 70 army nurses survived five months of combat conditions in the jungles of Bataan and Corregidor before being captured, only to endure more than three years in prison camps.

A 2025 Audie Award winner for Best Fiction Narrator! "Kristin Hannah’s potent storytelling skills are brilliantly served by narrator Julia Whelan, whose limber, low-pitched voice moves nimbly from person to person, capturing personality and mood, her empathy palpable." —The Washington Post...

The remarkable wartime diary of nurse Kathleen Johnstone ‘Warm, chatty and endlessly absorbing, this delightful diary brims with intelligence and humour.’ Wendy Moore, author of Endell Street: The Women Who Ran Britain’s Trailblazing Military Hospital The second world war could not have...