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Posts by: Jeanne Bryner

Learning to Heal
What is it like to be a student nurse? What are the joys, the stresses, the transcendent moments, the fall-off-your-bed-laughing moments, and the terrors that have to be faced and stared down? And how might nurses, looking back, relate these experiences in ways that bring these memories to life again and provide historical context for how nursing education has changed and yet remained the same?
In brave, revealing, and often humorous poetry and prose, Learning to Heal explores these questions with contributions by nurses from a variety of social, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds. Readers meet a black nursing student who is surrounded by white teachers and patients in 1940, a mother who rises every morning at 5 a.m. to help her family ready for their day before she herself heads to anatomy class, and an itinerant Jewish teenager who is asked, “What will you become?” These individuals, and many other women and men, share personal stories of finding their way to nursing school, where they begin a long, often wonderful, and sometimes daunting, journey.
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Tenderly Lift Me
Those who teach the literature of medicine have questioned why there is a lack of rich materials that connects nursing and the humanities. Author and poet Jeanne Bryner has gathered biographical sketches of remarkable nurses, each accompanied by poetry and photographs, and has created the multigenre presentation that is the compassionate and complex Tenderly Lift Me. This is the first book in the Literature and Medicine Series that concentrates on nurses’ voices and their experiences with providing health care. It enhances and extends perspectives on how health care is understood and delivered by recognizing nurses as the primary care givers.
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Breathless
Jeanne Bryner is a registered nurse. Her poems and stories have appeared in several magazines and journals, including Annals of Internal Medicine, American Journal of Nursing, International Journal of Arts Medicine, The Sun, and in the anthology Intensive Care. She is also the author of Tenderly Lift Me: Nurses Honored, Celebrated, and Remembered (2004).
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