The Complexities of Care: Nursing Reconsidered

Sioban Nelson and Suzanne Gordon have put together a collection of articles about the triumphs and challenges of nursing in the early 21st century entitled The complexities of care: Nursing reconsidered. Its contributions are drawn from Australia, the UK and the USA; yet, as they say, the problems in nursing and health care that are discussed are likely to be all too familiar, throughout the industrialized world. The book’s focus is on nursing discourses and their powerful impact on nurses and nursing – the collection develops an account of nurses being drawn into representations of themselves and their work that eventually misled them, undermining the resources nursing can command, and undermining nurses’ capacities and confi dence, too. This analysis is long overdue. This is a very good book, and I will set out here only a few of the reasons that I think so. First, and probably most importantly, it is a ‘good read’, very accessible and engaging. Writing for nurses, as this book commendably does, requires this immediate appeal; I’d say that this book has got just right the mix of everyday and scholarly language, for instance. The contributors speak with the authority of having ‘been there’ where nurses are, and that, too, will be very appealing to nurse readers. Although not all the authors are nurses, their positioning in relation to health care and nursing makes what they have to say entirely persuasive. However, what commands my own attention and wins my admiration is that this book takes a really courageous stance in addressing topics that nurses have held to be too sacred to challenge. Reading Chapter 3 almost takes my breath away: it tells the painful story of an editor of the American Journal of Nursing being ‘harangued, debased and threatened’ by nurse readers; a torrent of mail and abuse was unleashed on her for publishing a poem that disturbed the imaginary of the angelic nurse. Nelson and Gordon offer a challenge to health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) DOI: 10.1177/1363459308099687 Vol 13(2): 255 –268