The Super-Nurse

“During the war a helicopter arrived on a remote island in the Pacific carrying a doctor who was needed urgently for emergency surgery. The doctor was led to a small hut which staff had readied for the operation. Once scrubbed, he approached the makeshift operating table and surveyed his patient. Ready to begin, he reached for an instrument, but the nurse shook her head and handed him a different implement. ‘Oh . . . don’t tell me,’ he sighed, ‘a Hopkins nurse.’”This story, first reproduced in a 1940s pamphlet promoting the Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing, has become legendary for several generations of Hopkins nurses.“I joke about being an uppity nurse,” says Marian Grant, who earned her baccalaureate degree in nursing at the school in 2000 and her master’s degree as an acute care nurse practitioner in 2005. “Even as a new nurse, in certain situations, I thought, ‘I need to speak up.’ I would challenge doctors, challenge administration people, if necessary, on behalf of my patients.”Read more at...Johns Hopkins Nursing Magazine, Fall/Winter 2006 (Cover).