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Reviews
With a Dauntless Spirit: Alaska Nursing in Dog-Team Days, Six Personal Accounts
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Edited Effie Graham, Jackie Pflaum, and Elfrida Nord
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University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks, 2003. Maps, photographs, endnotes, bibliography, appendix, index. 345 pages. $45.00 paper.
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Reviewed by Terrence Cole
University of Alaska, Fairbanks
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| When there is a doctor in the house, nurses sometimes do not receive all the credit they deserve. But ask anyone who has ever stayed overnight in a hospital, and they will explain how valuable a dedicated nurse can be. While the physician may come and go, the nursing staff is there around the clock, providing kindly care and a personal touch and attending to all the small details that can mean the difference between sickness and health. If the closest doctor was hundreds of miles or months away, as was often the case in Territorial Alaska, nursing care was absolutely indispensable. |
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This book is a collection of a half-dozen first-hand accounts by Alaskan nurses, mostly from the 1920s and 1930s. It is a quiet but important addition to Alaska's medical literature that might easily be overlooked. The three editors — who are apparently veteran nurses from Alaska themselves — have selected and compiled the stories of six remarkable women who ministered to Alaskans during "dog-team days." |
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The bulk of the material comes from the archival files of the Alaska Nurses Association, which began systematically collecting tales of Alaskan nursing history in the 1950s. The files are now housed in the Rasmuson Library the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Thanks to the efforts of retired nurses such as Doris Southall, the Nurses' Collection is a rich warehouse of material, and the editors of this collection have done a nice job in selecting letters, memoirs, and other first-hand reports from among the many stories at their disposal. |
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The book might have been strengthened if the editors had been able to elaborate on and refine connections among these individual stories and some of the major themes and issues of Alaskan history or at least to give fuller context in the biographical introductions in each section. The composite parts could have then been assembled so that the sum total would have been a more through examination of the role of Alaskan nursing in the "dog days" before antibiotics. |
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For instance, after reading this book one realizes that outbreaks of diphtheria were hardly unusual in Alaska's past. Perhaps a more analytical approach could have placed the famed 1925 diphtheria epidemic that spawned the Serum Run to Nome and years later helped inspire the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in a proper context. The 1925 Serum Run is probably the most ballyhooed event in medical dog-mushing history, but it is not treated here at all. Lulu Welch, whose brief memoir is the first account in the book, was the nurse, anesthesiologist, and wife of Dr. Curtis Welch, the Nome physician at the time of the Serum Run, but there is no discussion of either her role or his during this notable event. Without this context, the subsequent complaints made by many Alaskans — including Gertrude Fergus, one of the other six nurses profiled in the book — about Dr. Welch's incompetence at the time of the epidemic are difficult to understand. |
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While none of these six accounts may offer any earth-shattering revelations about the big stories of Alaskan history, they are all valuable for the wealth of fascinating details each provides on the margins, telling us the little things about life and medical care in frontier Alaska, when the only doctors in town were likely to be nurses. |
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