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  • With a Dauntless Spirit: Alaska Nursing in Dog-Team Days
  • Edward T. Morman
Effie Graham, Jackie Pflaum, and Elfrida Nord, eds. With a Dauntless Spirit: Alaska Nursing in Dog-Team Days. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2003. xiv + 345 pp. Ill. $45.00 (cloth, 1-889963-61-5), $21.95 (paperbound, 1-889963-62-3).

With a Dauntless Spirit presents evidence from six nurses who worked in remote parts of Alaska between 1907 and the 1940s. Their patients were largely native Alaskans (Indians, Aleuts, and Eskimos), and each of the nurses viewed this constituency with genuine if paternalistic concern. Most of the sources are letters written to family or reports to sponsors; three of the sections include memoirs written years later. The nurses' experiences were by no means identical, but there are notable similarities. Lula Welch spent several decades in Alaska, working alongside her physician husband. Stella Fuller evidently felt that she had failed (largely because of poor planning on the part of her sponsoring agency) and left after one year, but the others all took joy in their assignments and were generally confident of the good they were doing. All regarded themselves as professionals armed with the most up-to-date knowledge of both medicine and nursing. Alma Carlson, who originally went to Alaska as a teacher but found that her responsibilities included health care, made a point of returning home for nurse training. Most of these nurses worked in the west, on or near the Seward Peninsula; one was stationed for a while in the southeast; but perhaps the most interesting stories come from Augusta Mueller, who worked in Barrow, on the north slope above the Arctic Circle, and thus experienced three winters when the sun did not rise between November and late January. The editors appropriately title her chapter with a quotation from one of her early letters: "We Had More Fun than Enough."

The value of this collection lies in what it can tell us about relations between European Americans and indigenous Alaskan cultures, between nurses and physicians, and between humans and their environment in sometimes extreme conditions. The editors' introduction and notes provide background and sources for further study of early nursing in Alaska, but more would have been better here. In particular, the tiny maps are wholly inadequate. For those unfamiliar with Alaskan geography, more detail, including topography and climate, would have been very useful.

The editors could have abbreviated the nurses' narratives a bit more, but most of what they provide is quite interesting. Mueller, for example, had occasional run-ins with an authoritarian physician, and said of an obstinate fellow nurse that she was as bad as the doctor; in this context, it is particularly interesting that Mueller almost always referred to the physician at the station as "Doctor"—capitalized, with no article preceding the title, and with no name following it. Mildred Keaton complained about physicians whose licenses were grandfathered in with no proper certification, and about one who apparently would have rather seen a patient die than receive medical treatment by a nurse, even if there was no physician within a day's travel. On the other hand, faced with a very sick young child whom she had diagnosed with "typhoid-pneumonia," Gertrude Fergus lamented: "My little patient is not so well this morning and I'm wishing, as I have [End Page 915] many times during the winter, that I had a doctor to rely upon. The responsibility is terrible" (p. 209).

Whether confronted with diphtheria, serious injuries, difficult childbirths, or difficult doctors, the nurses whose writings appear in this book took themselves seriously as conduits of scientific medicine and European-American civilization to people whom they regarded as needing their help. To a greater or lesser degree they also loved their indigenous patients and respected their cultures. Four of the six stayed in Alaska only for a specified tour of duty, but all sought the type of transcendent experience described by Mildred Keaton, after she spent two days watching a giant herd of caribou cross the Yukon River in their annual migration (p. 256).

This book is not a major contribution to the history of health...

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