THE NURSE’S SECRET
The unflinching, spellbinding new book from the acclaimed author of The Second Life of Mirielle West. Based on the little-known story of America’s first nursing school, a young female grifter in 1880s New York evades the police by conning her way into Bellevue Hospital’s training school for nurses, while a spate of murders continues to follow her as she tries to leave the gritty streets of the city behind…
Based on Florence Nightingale’s nursing principles, Bellevue is the first school of its kind in the country. Where once nurses were assumed to be ignorant and unskilled,
The unflinching, spellbinding new book from the acclaimed author of The Second Life of Mirielle West. Based on the little-known story of America’s first nursing school, a young female grifter in 1880s New York evades the police by conning her way into Bellevue Hospital’s training school for nurses, while a spate of murders continues to follow her as she tries to leave the gritty streets of the city behind…
Based on Florence Nightingale’s nursing principles, Bellevue is the first school of its kind in the country. Where once nurses were assumed to be ignorant and unskilled, Bellevue prizes discipline, intellect, and moral character, and only young women of good breeding need apply. At first, Una balks at her prim classmates and the doctors’ endless commands. Yet life on the streets has prepared her for the horrors of injury and disease found on the wards, and she slowly gains friendship and self-respect.
Just as she finds her footing, Una’s suspicions about a patient’s death put her at risk of exposure, and will force her to choose between her instinct for self-preservation, and exposing her identity in order to save others.
Amanda Skenandore brings her medical expertise to a page-turning story that explores the evolution of modern nursing—including the grisly realities of nineteenth-century medicine—as seen through the eyes of an intriguing and dynamic heroine.
- Kensington Books
- Paperback
- June 2022
- 368 Pages
- 9781496726537
Buy the Book
$16.95
About Amanda Skenandore
Amanda Skenandore is an award-winning author of historical fiction and a registered nurse. Her debut novel, Between Earth and Sky, was winner of the American Library Association’s RUSA Reading List Award and her third novel, The Second Life of Mirielle West, was the 2023 Silicon Valley Reads Selection, an Apple Best Books of the Month and a Hoopla Book Club Pick. She lives in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Praise
BookBub’s Best Historical Fiction of Summer
“A spellbinding story, a vividly drawn setting, and characters that leap off the pages. This is historical fiction at its finest!” – Sara Ackerman, USA Today bestselling author of The Codebreaker’s Secret
Discussion Questions
1. The Nurse’s Secret offers fascinating glimpse of what life was like for America’s very first professional nurses. What were some of the most significant differences you noticed between early nursing as it’s represented in the novel and your understanding of the profession today?
2. How has the nursing profession remained the same today as it was 150 years ago?
3. Did the qualifications required to apply to the Bellevue Nurse Training School surprise you?
4. Great wealth and extreme poverty existed side by side in gilded-age New York with almost no middle class in between. The rich lived in European-inspired mansions along Millionaires Row while the poor crowded into tenements—sometimes living a dozen people to a room. How was this reflected in the novel? Does the same degree of class stratification exist today?
5. How did the death of Una’s mother shape her outlook?
6. Una has a list of rules to survive life on the streets. How did those rules help her? How did they hurt her? Do you think any of the rules are worth carrying over into her new life?
7. Do you think Edwin and Una are a good fit for each other? Do you think their relationship will endure?
8. Today, nurses are consistently ranked as the number one most trusted profession in America in Gallup’s annual poll. Do you feel that distinction is deserved?
9. When Edwin tells Una he doesn’t care who knows about their romance, she replies, “Easy for you to say. You don’t have anything to lose” What gender dynamics are at play in the novel? Do those same dynamics exist today?
10. Dr. Joseph Lister came to America in 1876 to share his ideas about germ theory and asepsis, but it was several years before the medical community fully embraced his ideas. Why do you think there was such reluctance? Aside from germ theory, what medical advances in the past 150 years do you think have had the biggest impact?