Rhma Noor is a second-year nursing student at the University of Alberta. She has a degree in Biology with a minor in English, but she decided to pursue a degree in Nursing because she enjoys theory-based learning with a hands-on approach.
In her free time, Rhma enjoys drawing, reading, and skateboarding. Rhma created a contemporary book list for nurses of all specialties based off of prevalent books that touch on important issues, such as women's health and the intersection of race and medicine.
We hope you enjoy her top reading choices for nurses!
For her own good: Two centuries of expert advice to women
Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English
Medicine and medical advancement, frequently seen as a bastion of progress and enlightenment, also manifests the dark of humanity without fail. Throughout history,
medicine has been held and withheld by the forces of money, power, and control. Aptly titled, For Her Own Good describes the ways in which medicine has subjugated women in the name of science. First published in 1978, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English expose the core of medical establishment, capitalism, psychiatry, and child rearing as corrupted with hatred for women.
As medicine continues to be polluted with pseudoscience, this book urges the world not to lose faith in medicine, but to hold the interpretation of science to higher standards. It is a book that fully discloses the infuriating facts about how science and medicine have betrayed women and their bodies, their livelihood, and their autonomy.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot
Though she has been dead almost 70 years, her cells continue to thrive-in beakers and petri dishes and microscope slides. Taken without her knowledge, her cells revolutionized science and medicine in fundamental ways. Her cells were the first "immortal" human cells grown in culture. If you combined all her cells ever grown, they would weigh more than 50 million metric tons. Without these cells, medicine wouldn't have known advancements such as the polio vaccine development; fundamental research for cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping. Her cells fuelled a multimillion-dollar industry while her family members could not afford medical care. Her name was Henrietta Lacks and she is buried in an unmarked grave. In this book, a reporter takes us on a harrowing journey to
understand medical institution and the people it betrayed, stripping the realm
of scientific discovery and its human consequences.
An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives
Matt Richtel
Pulling together the intimate life stories of four individuals, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Matt Richtel crafts a soulful epic about the human immune system in all its complexity.
A terminal cancer patient defies death, a medical marvel triumphs over HIV, two women whose bodies seemingly turn against them-Matt Richtel's An Elegant Defense weaves narratives together with science to illuminate the body's mechanism of defense and healing. The resulting book is an epic that is intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and full of wonder at the human body and the human experience.
List, reviews, and illustrations done by second-year BSCN Student Rhma Noor.