Alice Fitzgerald, a glamorous young debutante, shocked her family when she decided to become a nurse. At the turn of the century nursing was considered a degrading profession, but Alice was drawn to it and spurned her life of idleness among the rich. When she entered the Nurses Training School at Johns Hopkins, she little dreamed that she would achieve worldwide fame. She served as a nurse in the Sicily earthquake area and with the British Army on the front lines in France during World War I. Later she became Chief Nurse for the American Red Cross, fighting disease and starvation among Europe’s homeless millions and organizing modern nursing schools in key cities. She pioneered the work of Public Health Nursing in the United States and then in the Philippines, and established nursing schools in the Far East.

She followed her heart — even though it meant facing danger.

The scream of tortured tires, an echoing crash, an overturned automobile… Within crowded seconds, the overindulged scion of the prominent Hauser family lay on the brink of death.

Nurse Annette saved his life — and earned first the gratitude and then the wrath of his powerful father. And as she found herself involved in a bitter controversy in which lives as well as principles were at stake, she realized that only her heart could supply the answer to her most vital dilemma…

From the start Nurse Ann Persons was glad she’d moved to New York City from her small upstate hometown. She loved working in a big-city hospital with its daily challenges. She loved using her nursing skills to their fullest. She loved Manhattan, with its glamour, excitement, and variety. But Ann was not one to be overwhelmed by the sophisticated city. The new men in her life, flamboyant Dr. Ronald Laing and serious Dr. Craig Downing, both discovered that New York with its fast pace would never change Ann’s old-fashioned ideas about love. And the hospital hierarchy learned that nothing — absolutely nothing — could change the stubborn nurse’s old-fashioned ideas about putting her patients’ welfare above all else.

Pretty Ellen Whitaker, R.N., faces a choice between the handsome doctor she loves and the dark suspicions that threaten to ruin him.

Why did the people of Barfield avoid their hospital? Why did they whisper “criminal” about its director, Dr. Jerry Sterling, when they talked of the mysterious death of his beautiful wife, Naomi? And what was driving Naomi’s brother, Henry Barfield, to use his membership on the hospital board to ruin Dr. Sterling?

Desperately, pretty Ellen struggled to find the answers. Pitted against her consuming love for Jerry Sterling were the hostility of her neighbors and the terrible suspicions she could not shake free from her own mind. In a story shaken with passion, hiding at its heart a dreadful secret, Ellen Whitaker finds herself all but alone as the nurse against the town.

Doctors don’t keep you alive. I do.

Sometimes I help people live.
Sometimes I help them die.
Always, I help them. I’m a nurse.

The shocking, inspiring, surprise bestseller of the year. Nurse is the story of eight weeks in the life of a real nurse in a large urban hospital. It is all here: the joy and pain, the death and drama, the mistakes, successes and secrets. Nurse reads like a novel, but sticks in the memory like a real experience. Because it is.