FRANCES WARD

Annette: A Nurse's Story

Available on Amazon

Encouraged by Harvard University’s Charles W. Eliot, Alfred Worcester, a practicing physician in Waltham, MA, had dreamed of establishing a Harvard University School of Nursing. “It was a great disappointment,” wrote Worcester in his 1944 Reminiscences, “to President Eliot as well as to myself that the proposal failed.” In this work of historical fiction, Frances Ward imagines the creation of a school that would have established nursing’s place within one of the nation’s premiere universities. The novel focuses on the historical experiences of Annette Fiske, born in Cambridge in 1873. A student of Greek and Latin at Radcliffe College, Fiske entered the Waltham Training School for Nurses and, upon graduation, became a nursing leader whose efforts with Eliot and Worcester failed.

Ward imagines an alternative history in which Fiske and Worcester are successful in creating a Harvard School of Nursing that, in time, transforms the United States healthcare system into a model of health promotion and disease prevention. By establishing the foundation for a national system of free comprehensive health services, Fiske, Worcester, and the Harvard School found an international model of ways to promote improved health outcomes. The novel concludes in 1975 with a fictionalized celebration of the Harvard University School of Nursing’s seventy-fifth convocation in which Elizabeth Byrne accepts the posthumous award of the Harvard Medal for her mother’s contributions to nursing.

Biography

Frances Ward, PhD, RN, NP, is Professor Emerita at Temple University. She is also the Founding Dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (now Rutgers – The State University of New Jersey). Throughout her academic and research career, she maintained a clinical practice serving residents in Newark, Camden, and Philadelphia. Annette: A Nurse’s Story is her second novel.

Published: February 28, 2024